township bulletin boards cable television and intelligent web saying in addition the budget was available for review review in the library on our website and at the municipal building council schedule act on a budget in december nineteenth the regular council meeting public hearing for the budget actually to pull in every budget i'm required by the hundred charter to submit a recommended budget to council as part of the process the council has conducted two workshops with six department paving program would pay five and a half miles of road which is probably one of the large ones we've done and i want park expansion project was completed we had two out of three storm sewer projects one of the things out for the projects using our and using up our budget surplus some of the projects in two thousand and twelve we're going to continue to focus on infrastructure which doesn't do about a one point four million dollars paying program that will result because of the way that their the process is set up through the state a lot of our tax revenues will be coming in from out of county sources and they have the ability to withhold those taxes for at least for for sixty  days so where were estimated to basically the bulk of our fourth quarter earnings come tax that we should get won't be received until two thousand and thirteen or open world for a long pipe down that's what we're making the assumption of so the current income is twenty percent less than what we don't normally would get pension increases are thirty five percent this year on top of significant increases in the past years this is due because of our performance in the police pension plan you know two thousand and twelve that did not occur and the county is continuing to try to defer that to record on that issue in the meantime we continue to get numerous assessment of pills and and there capital projects you know this year we were doing a lot of capital projects and we're reducing our sir but i don't think we could sustain that level of capital projects in two thousand and thirteen and we're going to probably need to  at least this year because of that we even though it was going down to our balance we're going to have a four point two million dollar bounce we're better by the end of next year so there's still significant downs one village three hundred twenty one thousand one hundred we have a value of three hundred twenty six million for zero eight five seventy our initial budget estimates were just three hundred twenty six million we've got the fisher numbers in from the county this week so we'll be modifying or not slightly it doesn't have a major effect of course the twenty percent deferral of earn income tax doesn't help but you know the the average income is still fairly healthy grants are down so there is a reduction in our balance and again i said this is not unexpected ok the proposed budget for two thousand and twelve is twenty million two hundred twenty three thousand the major the largest overall spent years are from public works and thirty one percent followed by public safety and recreation at sixteen percent to break it down a little better if you look at the operating expenditures  public safety is usually our largest at thirty percent because they're very personnel have been basically half of our employees are in those two departments police and fire and then  public works second it's our second largest department with personnel after that we have it pretty much is distributed pretty eighteen months the other departments insurance will be the next big ones and the two big items there some of the major budget projects that that we have next year and we've already gone over some of the things as i see our capital projects is that the biggest item is as public works because of the growth programs of the other programs followed by recreation because of the major field projects just as some of the capital prizes that we have a total capital budget is five point nine billion which you know for us is it that's huge every normal on a normal year we would be between two and three million so we're of about double that because one hundred thousand which we've been putting money into criminal each year and picture of the last year the field three or four conversion right now that's shown in our budget that that's one thing i'd like to discuss the council my opinion based on our timing for the field lights i would have a concern that we may need to use that field case we don't get everything done at the right time and socket an hour for the field to the right in a free world play or the of things we're going to be discussing in our workshop as to what all should be included in the conference a plan you can then the other thing we talked about one of the recent workshops under the renovation to the municipal building it was my recommendation that we might need to i i will start by saying that that generally speaking i think the timeship is really well maintained i think mike does a terrific job and and all the roads pre taping and the plans in the budget for infrastructure improvements was there but from there's there's more to come the questions and i'm assuming that this is maybe a question and answer because i do have some questions  obviously know why i was here before my concern about the more social issue and you know how that went the question i have is is that the least it's that people have about the difference in the maybe a five at the track it was under cleaning green and current it's only the land value in guinea and the tax on the rigs or anything like that i guess the thing i was trying to understand from the things that i've been reading about this both of them are convinced that the legislation that's voted on by both houses is going to pass and is what the governor wants and so i'm just well that in a day answer your question though the air i think and my own personal opinion i think the the negative is where the pros as far as that because of the preemption language but there there is language in there that the on the extraction fee or tax whatever you want to call it that a certain sure how the final amount will be either stairs and a lot of discussions as to the the way that will be distributed at one point they were talking about giving it to the counties and then having the counties dull without similar to what they do with the  i guess that's some of my comment on the revenue side make my comment on the next expenditure side is again related to what i was saying earlier i think at the end of the intention to continue to favor was and and and repair the infrastructure is really important because of those things are the kind of things that become huge issues as they become more and more deteriorated  some of the comments of mike was saying about the possibility of having to for infrastructure projects because if we do that we might have to have a tax increase i use spears time peterso saturday when the fathers organize a kid if the kids aren't organized they're not there and in between the seasons there's nobody using the ceo's and what's even more bothersome to me is that there are signs on this feels  football field the field that we're talking about improving to put the the turf on all summer long established summer had signs on the said field cluster and the reason for that is that their grass fields and you can't play on grass fields one hundred percent of the time it takes time for turf to regenerate itself especially in the great amount of played it does fields get and i shortened that i don't know when you walk through the park but in our peak hours we don't have enough field space to talking about here is building a church for easter sunday so we have we have six or eight weeks in the spring and six or eight we fall and we're talking about spending money to put astroturf on a field that that elementary school kids are going to play in the long term maintenance costs are dramatically less than in having to maintain a grass field and in addition you gain a lot of available space by having the ability to practice or play on those fields when it rains be going to any of the rec board meetings and understands the problems that we have with a veiled simplex i know what the problems are because my kids play soccer and i know what those issues are and i don't know that the worst thing in the world this is a ten or twelve year old ever see kids on the sea almost when there's not an adult and some were a nice thing going on and i think that we're just taking this further further and i think it's great that we have and i just take it it was fifty thousand dollars or one hundred thousand dollars to think about spending a million and a half dollars to provide this kind of a field for kids that are under twelve years old and it's just horrible evil to me but about the feels after our last council meeting where the issue came up about lighting the soccer field question came to mind now please understand by the way that the comments that i'm going to make tonight are business they're not personal and if you take them that way i'm sorry but these are going to be five fifteen it's getting dark and i expected to see some kids practicing football the lights on the lights were on season  yeah yeah i mean we had to have these fields we had to have these lights it was i could steal see at five o'clock in the evening so why do we need the lights because to pay for temporary lights ok that cost us a considerable amount of money jim what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a request to mr sylvester because i'd like to know the number of days or nights or evenings or whatever it is that those lights were actually used and how many hours because if were you realize that the lights were paid for by the i don't work care about who paid for them they're my lights ok the thing i do care about is whether or not we're going to spend another chunk of money on more lights that may not be needed now if those lights were used for an hour and a half per night for a total of twenty nights out of the three hundred sixty five days in the year that is what i would describe as a double p rated mistake and i sure sure you that i don't want to define what p p stands for but again what i am missing the point that the lights were so important to the foot organization they want  raise two hundred thousand dollars that's the necessity you're saying they're not necessary yet an organization goes out and raises over two hundred thousand dollars because they felt the necessity to get the lights looked really good on those as much as you'd look jim give me credit who came to your office encouraged you to get into the fundraising business to help support our sports but who did that who came to your office in the bank you to do that who was it you who said you were the best guy to do this thing be i recognize your talent your skills i see what you did with a quarterback club but when i look at this amount of money that we're going to need i'm looking at him and i'm looking at me and i'm saying i can't afford to do it is going to pay my electric bill i can afford more tax increases you could literally say sports programs here in peter's township you've got the organizational capacities you've got the contacts you can go out and scour the country for various obvious we're running out of money we're running out of new home construction we haven't seen it and i'm frankly i don't think this economy is going to turn around but let me digress to what i want to talk about this evening beside the sports thing we could go on knowledgeable appreciated we increased our milage but whatever happened to the crisis somehow the crisis want to weigh whatever did we do something right or was there a crisis to begin with one interesting i don't know that there was a crisis doesn't go away in a year financial crisis we were able to give one one mailed back from the two m that we increased in two thousand one hundred ten we gave one back last year with a seven million dollars surplus we're down we're an eight million dollars or pressured on the four and a half so we're spending money just is mr sylvest said at a much faster rate than we're bringing it to him if we call it burning so that's what really gives me concern i mean you you cannot keep asking the golden goose to produce a golden eggs without running into the potential that the goose is going to quit laying and that's what i'm concerned about just how much further when we stretch the budget now by and large the standard of living from an a miniscule standpoint in peters township is probably better than any other township in washington county i think we're arms legs elbows above what you could find in virtually other any other community but that's it i don't want to lose that i don't want to lose so what are some things that we need to do about and this is basically my feelings about how i might help this township survive war prosper but there are a couple of little things that i would bring up as examples the number of new home construction is approximately eighty this year as i look back in previous years it's roughly half of what it was say eight or ten years ago that represents for a community that depended on  new home construction a large chunk of money so why do we still have a full complement of building inspectors and a full compliment in our planning department do we really need those people do we anticipate that we're going to have a booming a building boom in the next year probably not now what i have saying and i've got to give credit to north on this issue they probably experienced the same kind of cut back in new instructions as we did or similar but they took their inspection department and went over to township and they worked out an agreement so all the inspections in nottingham township were being done by people who would have normally been working full time at nordstrom and so maybe we need to look at if we if we don't want  furlough or layoff fire or whatever you choose to call it which is an unfortunate thing maybe what we need to do is looking is look at how we can use staff redundant staff and it may not be just planning and and inspection it could be other things as well we need to look at using those staffs in a much more efficient way to get more done born reduce the staff those are the two choices th this far is spending decisions you know i've never heard anybody talk about a cost benefit ratio here in the three or four years that i've attended our council  meetings never heard a single request for cost benefit ratio basically we talk about the sports fields that's what we're talking about the benefit to the community versus the cost but the cost benefit ratio and though we're not talking statistics we are down to the nitty gritty i'd like to see that happen i'll give you a perfect example of what i'm talking about the and i hate to bring it up but it's just such a glaring error the license plate recognition system ok it traps me crazy as it turns out weeks ago i called the chief because i wanted to know why we weren't using it i don't see any arrests for people who have an expired driver's license i don't see anybody pulling over first suspended license because they've been convicted of a d y now as this is happening will the chief proceed to tell me that the reason is that penn dot does not load the information into the computer unless that photo system has a computer base to work with there's nothing that can be used it cannot be used for anything other than a den a fine for stolen car if they've stolen cars license p into the data system it was one hundred thousand dollars we will talk about where parts of it came from and grants and all that sort of thing but it's one hundred thousand dollars of the came that will come out of taxpayers back pockets whether it's from peters or a combination of other times it's one hundred thousand dollars my son told me the other night he says why don't they put them on e bay or craigslist and see if we can get some money out of it since it's not going to be serving any pretense of a principled function and see if we can at least achieve something from them but those kinds of decisions need to be examined very very closely if i recall that decision was made driving on a suspended license are we going to stop what's the estimate how many felons how many stolen cars are we going to retrieve the only thing we found out was that we don't have a lot of them that is just one example we start talking about other items spending decisions on the new ball field lights come up they're just a plethora of examples that i could talk about but i would like to encourage you decide whether or not it's going to be good for the home for the family i mean if i go out and come home with a stuffed elephant and put it in my living room chances are my wife is not going to be very happy with me and i may be trying to get that   to write down the street so i can get away but i think we have to analyze ice t exactly what's good for the township from the standpoint of what we are spending whether it comes from a grant whether  money that's dropped in the front of them when it's a full building in bundles whatever the case might be we have to do a better job in analyzing the benefit we just can't assume that what we here is all good think cars the other thing is any of you who have been in the military know what a life extension program is this is what we do with for example thanks when they were out we rebuild them my understanding is that the new vehicles that the township is buying we have police cars trucks and that sort of thing need special equipment that we do not possess to do the analysis whenever there's a misfunction we aren't we don't we will not be able to do the diagnosis ourselves which means maintenance costs are likely to go up if we have to drive it to the dealer or to have it towed to the dealer i'd like to suggest that maybe what we do do it is to have our maintenance department our mechanic look at means by which he can get one hundred fifty thousand miles out of our vehicles rather than one hundred thousand miles i'm going through that process myself because i don't want to buy a new vehicle they're expensive they're complicated i can't fix them myself i can't even change plugs anymore so by keeping older vehicles on the road for a longer period of time simply by doing some preventive maintenance and some maintenance and repair we might be able to save a bundle of mone y insurance health insurance benefits are insurance costs are pretty reasonable if we're going to bleed high and we talked about health care i would do health care seminar today because i've got to make a decision because i'm in medicare age and what i heard today didn't make me real happy but that's one of them to live with or die with if that's the case but under the circumstances the health insurance policies that we have for our township workers are what i would basically call a cadillac program their deductibles or their costs their costs out of pocket expense for these policies range between five and ten percent depending upon how long you've been employed those are astronomically golazo in comparison with what the marketplace is bearing today as a former federal employee i can tell you that my out of pocket expenses for health care for my family ranged between forty and fifty percent of the total cost of that program so that policy cost me between forty and fifty percent and they were  i'm thinking that in the future we may want to look at these insurance costs and i say that with a somewhat of a a sarcastic tone only because i'm reflecting on the people in organized labor i used to be a union vice president i was a member of a labor organization i'd lost a lot of court battles so now labor is not out of favor with me but i was also in management and i can recognize at this point that these costs for insurance policies are something that we may not be able to afford and while the employees of the township may regret it i'm afraid we may have to look at these it with a very keen  e frankly a lot of their union salaries wages went to support the passage of the affordable health care bill that now hangs over top of our heads so in a way i'm feeling that if these people went out there and struggled to help the president get this health care bill through then certainly who are we to disappoint them and not letting them  by the way we would only have to pay two thousand dollars or burn floy annual and after that it would be on them so i mean there's a there's a there's a way of doing that now i may not go that dramatic but certainly that's a tool  available to us if we can't get spending under control the other thing is if i'm not mistaken in looking at the and looking at the budget we're proposing a three percent increase for senior officials in the township i can tell you this as a manager i think income ought to be tied to performance does anyone anybody know anything about management by objectives there you go know the guy that wrote the book the thing i'd like to do is see us change our philosophy i realize that we have a long tradition of not doing that in this township but in today's world successful businesses set objectives they set time limits they set finance levels and they set a schedule for getting it done resources required and i'd like to see that happen in this at various times mr sylvester and its staff have been praised not only by you but by a lot of other individuals in the community i'd like to throw the gauntlet of challenge down to mr sylvester by saying please help us tighten this up let's do a better job let's do a more efficient job now i don't think at any time might  i'm talking about actual measurable efficiencies you know whether or not you did ten more tasks in the five hour period of time that you had to do them and you did last year which particular ministry of department  that rewards our management staff by meeting objectives that's the only rational way i can think of that we will make progress whether that progress is measured by holding down costs or whether it's expanded programs to tell you about this my latest electric bill remember when we talked about electrical generation i won't bring that up about the nucular facility but i just want to let you know that on the other side of tax there's the real world let's pan power sent me this build for this month now if i read this correctly last year i use twelve thousand two hundred eighty eight kilowatt hours this year i use slightly less two thousand for twelve thousand four hundred so i've actually reduced my own electrical consumption by daily average cost in two thousand and ten was a dollar eighty one cents a day now it's two dollars and sixty eight cents that's a fifty percent increase  so please because i think you're capable of doing it all of you let's try and refine our approach to how we finance and manage the to thank you for your time