myself mike chair of the warrant committee who will come up in a few minutes want to thank you for coming to this this meeting it's a bit of an experiment that mike and i put together focus principly on new town meeting members but not all exclusively and really with two purposes one is for me to review as town moderator of the overview of town meeting and  the conduct of town meeting the role and preparation the warrant and then mike will talk about the town's finances looking particularly at long term issues and trends terms of a town meeting as i say some of this will be old hat for those who've been and i see a number of longtime town meeting members here in the  audience but i can hearken back to when i first got in town meeting many many years ago just saying to mike that i didn't know anything about town meeting how it ran who was whom so for who was who and so forth so i'll try to just give a broad overview first on the role of town meeting i mean the way i am in the purpose of town meeting it is in terms of local government is it's our towns legislative and not all states in the country have town meetings with really a longstanding and particular new england tradition and one that i think as actually stood in new england in good stead and certainly i feel it has and belmont is a legislative body it's obviously similar to congress in the federal level or the house and senate in the state house or city council where you have the city form of government the town meeting is really the  version of the city council it scares me in broad strokes i see two overarching purposes of town meeting one is it helps make policy michael eavis one as i said is going to talk about the budget in a few minutes and that is the chief policy document really for any entity whether it's a federal government or state government or local government because outs where a town or  state decides how to allocate money and where to invest so the budget is of course the major policy document but then there are all sorts of other policy issues that we consider a town meeting that you're well aware of  subtle or but i think very important role of town meeting is it's a check on the executive and that's true again at the federal and state level whether it's congress or legislature in boston or town meeting and i don't say that in a critical way i say that it actually a very positive way because that's how the framers of the constitution designed it so you have the check in this case the legislative bodies a check on the executive and one of the things i've seen over the years is that when there is a proposal from the board of selectmen or some other entity might be planning board whatever that hasn't been as well thought through as it might have been and i often as moderator don't really know that in advance but i've seen town meeting members get up as this kind of question that kind of question and another and another and it becomes clear that whatever the proposal or project is needs more work and in the end town meeting in them a number of occasions where this has happened town meeting will it down and the centrally suggests that whoever the energy is the planning board board of selectmen go back to a little more work and then bring it back to town meeting one particular thing i'm thinking of that happened when back and then subsequently a much improved proposal came forward and was adopted unanimously so i thought that was an really terrific moment that underscored the importance of town meeting but they have a responsibility and they've exercise it well in many cases to kick the tires if you will on proposal second thing i want to talk about briefly is the preparation of the warrant for those of you who are new there are really two kinds of town meetings is the annual town meeting and that's in takes place in may in june and then there's special town meetings special town meetings really are all other town meetings that take place either at a different time of year we often have a special town meeting in the fall in october or november or where the annual town meeting warrant has already been put to bed then we might have a special town meeting embedded in the end you have town meeting because it can be called separately from the town meeting and so next week on wednesday we actually have two special town meetings back to back the board of selectmen is the group obviously that they are like the board that puts the warrant together for town meeting and for the annual town meeting at some point in the late when or they will open the warrant and announce that they are or the warrant is opened open and then begin to put forward their own suggestions more than suggestions or on recommendations that will form the the warrant for town meeting but during and then after some period of time the warrant is closed during that time any citizens can with a citizen petition with only ten signatures as we are required can submit an item for the warrant so that's a key moment for citizen participation because obviously the ten signatures is a very low low bar  if the warrants not open and one wants to call a special town meeting and that requires two hundred signatures and we've had two examples of that we had last summer the special town meeting on  of the citizen participation or initiative for town meeting couple of thoughts additional points one of the things that confuses newcomers and the others who've been around even is a different between an article  a motion so the initial warrant has articles and the articles frame the particular issue but then the question is that's a broader then what needs to happen and this is done as part of the preparation for town meeting has to have specific motions within the article and those motions have to be within the scope of the article so if you have an article for example that was talking about funding for belmont center you could not change that and have funding for cushing square or something like that because that would change the scope of the article presented on the other hand the motion is more specific the article may not have any mention of money but then the specific motion will have and so that's confuse people sometimes they say well there was no money in the ark you know because it was just framing what the purpose was the motion carries for example a specific authorization for for a particular project the key committees involved in the preparation of the war and obviously the board of selectmen but then in addition the warrant committee capital budget committee and the planning board of the three sort of committees town clerk ellen cushman obviously and myself as town moderator play a critical role finally turn to the conduct of town meeting  there's an enormous amount of preparation that goes into into town meeting since i became moderator i've instituted a practice of having a group of individuals who have put together the the warrant superintendent chair the planning board myself town treasurer town clerk town council and staff david calle so there are about twelve and fourteen of us  who are involved in the planning of town meeting and our purpose is to try to put together the organization of the articles and the anticipation of discussion  in a way that makes it as smooth as possible and also as easy as possible for a town meeting members to to understand what it is what the sequence and what it is were  what it is we're focusing on that's particularly important around the filing of the amendments and as many of you know anything any significant amendment needs to be filed three business days in advance amendments from the floor need to be simple and it's up to me to accept them or not and often as you people have been in town meeting no it gets quite confusing about what it is we're voting on so in the planning and then in the execution of town meeting i try to make that as clear as possible for newcomers we consider the amendments before the main article at the main motion so in the case of article six mcgaughey has put forward a series of amendments and i believe the three will remain in it to will be withdrawn so we will present an article six will come up on monday so after reading of article six and planning board and so forth will then turn to the amendments and consider each of the amendments in sequence once they have been disposed of them we go back to the main motion as amended or not so that's the this is the structure of how we consider amendments on town meeting and that's the area where over the years i have found of the greatest confusion about in industry debate a town meeting floor and and the meaning of a particular men are not in terms of the actual conduct town meeting and what we do we are guided by a book called town meeting times which has been developed over the years and is really a wonderful summary of just about every issue that can come before a town meeting we also have i mean it's not totally buy that it's a version of robert's rules but it's been adapted and then we have our own practices and bylaws so that have evolved over time and in those so there's no one absolute three page handout the describes how we how we conduct our own town meeting the town meeting times is my bible when after i got elected the first time i read it and then i've read it again and again and again and before  go back and refresh my memory on it and as those of you who are in town meeting know if i have a question i'm not a lawyer if i have a question about a legal issue or something i consult i take a moment consult with george hall get his input because i want to make sure that we're doing things appropriately i was should say that what i've tried to do overall couple final comments in my time as moderator is balance the importance of having a full airing of import of issues let's say for example article six we're talking about something that has a huge impact on the town of belmont and it's very important i think therefore to have a full  on the one hand on the other trying to streamline town meeting as much as possible and have it not be repetitive and that people not go on too long so a year ago i instituted a practice of limiting  comments to five minutes and two questions so we have a question of somebody or it can be somebody has made a presentation or could be relevant if it's a client clancy  please have a questions prepared in advance one of the things that this does i think is helps accelerate a town meeting but it requires town meeting members if they have a series of questions to do some work in advance and homework which i think is important so for example if there's something to do with the capital budget always gets a lot of questions when we're purchasing an ambulance or whatever lot of people are uncertain about where direct and the email sent an email get directed to the proper place and so i would strongly encourage town meeting members in the to question limit is meant to do that too as well and the leave night and this so forth ask all as many questions as you have in advance now sometimes when somebody makes a presentation of course they raise an issue he or she raise an issue had thought of and so it's perfectly appropriate to ask questions so nobody's saying shouldn't ask questions but the practice of going on for you know three four five eight ten questions i think is not fair or respectful of town meeting so i've gotten a lot of positive feedback about those changes to five minutes into questions and then reminding new town meeting members that the that nobody can speak a second time until all people who want to speak a first time on a given question are given amendment given motion one thing that new town meetings members are not of a puzzle by it's all just raise it is the so called calling the question  which essentially is a motion to terminate debate and it's not debatable and it requires a two thirds vote so somebody is waiting in line and they get to them and they recognize the person he or she says it's moderator call the question and then that leads immediately to a vote on terminating debate which requires two thirds my experience is almost always that motion passes because usually it's made after there's been a lots of discussion i've very rarely remember a time when somebody makes that motion after a handful of people talk that usually after something like that and it almost always is passed but that's up to town meeting and i guess i just finally say that i appreciate very much being town moderator i've made a major effort in my time to improve the workings of town meeting i have great respect for i've spent my whole career in politics and government starting undergraduate and graduate work school so i have i care very much about  american democracy and government and i think town meeting is a very valued part of of that and so i've tried to make it help make it work well and make myself available i've said i  my e mail at town hall but i would just say it's mike dot j a g mail dot com so he mailed any time you have a question or concern or suggestion over the time i've been moderator the eight or nine years people have made a number of suggestions that i've incorporated that i've tried to improve the workings of town meeting and i've appreciated that very much and i appreciate any kind of input because what i'm trying to do is make town meeting as good an entity and working as workings as possible so thank you very much and i'll turn it over likely vin thank you mike thank you very much for coming on michael events and i'm sure the work committee i am going to give a presentation about the budget at town meeting in a couple days so what i'm going to try to do is not be completely redundant with what i'm about to say in a few days so what i'm going to do is i'm going to give a little bit of background just for those who may be new on the warren committee i'll talk at a more cursory way about the budget itself i'll give you you know some highlights of that but i won't really dig in very much and i'll spend more time on free cash and on some long term trends because those are areas where we don't really get a chance to dig in quite a bit at town meeting so hopefully the kind of the two presentations between this one and that one will give you kind of a good book and about it so just quickly for terms of show of hands how many folks are new to me members a reasonable number ok so we have a bit of a mixture between some new some old that's great ok so mike if you would mind going to the next representatives from either the board of selectmen or the school committee so the chairs of the boards like in the school committee can either sit on the work for me themselves or nominate someone what we do is we make recommendations the town meeting we had vies town meeting  on financial issues most specifically any appropriations if there is an appropriation that is on the warrant is our obligation to actually provide advice and counsel to town meeting if there are any other issues that we see as having a meaningful financial impact on the town those are al o issues that will weigh in on so there are certain issues that are on the warrant that don't meet either of those two criteria and you'll see that the work committee doesn't actually comment on that the budget itself as you might imagine is of course as mike said the largest area of appropriation and it's the largest responsibility for town meeting so we spent an enormous amount of time as a war committee on the budgets working with the border selectman and the school committee in the town administrator who are essentially the ones that are drafting the first part of the budget so the town administrator oversees the municipal side in the drafting of the budget with oversight from the board of selectmen the the the school superintendent and the school staff are the ones that draft the school budget and they do that with oversight from the school committee and then there weren't committee subcommittees that are responsible for each of the different areas of the government whether it's education or public safety or public works public services that actually work and provide oversight and the committee report is then the product of that is a seventy five page or so long study that everybody has received and it's an opportunity for you to kind of get the both the overview at the front but also detailed view of each individual department and part of the purpose of that is to as mike said provide essentially oversight and a check on the government and to make sure that the departments that are actually running different areas have at least one layer on top of it that is sort of keeping an eye out and then providing advice and c in the fire department that has exceeded our expectations and so we need to actually put money towards that might be special education costs that might be high it could be immediate problem with a piece of equipment that needs to be addressed where there's no money in the budget to do that so there mechanism that the work committee has for actually doling out at least a modest amount of money using a process which i won't get into but there's a really thoughtful process for how that is done ok so i'm going to skip the next page and i'll go on to just a quick overview of the budget itself so the next one mike overall the budget is one hundred six million dollars this year and as you can see the lion's share of that eighty percent of it is in the form of property taxes so this picture right here is the revenue side of the picture where is the money come from the money comes from fundamentally from four primary sources from property taxes which is eighty percent from local receipts from free cash and some other sources of cash and then from stated which is the eight point eight percent so because the budget is one hundred six million dollars you've got about eighty six million in property taxes seven point one million in local receipts and again local receipts are things like motor vehicle excise tax or the ambulance funds that are generated or the rock department you know pool fees for example or licenses and permits that are done for building permits so those are the big chunks for example of local receipts and i would get into free cash in more detail in the future and then lastly stated which is money from the state either in chapter seventy funds which is school way but is used for a broad set of things or chapter ninety funds which are specifically for the roads or some other kinds of state so the are couple different kinds of stated the one we'll mention just really quickly it's a little bit of an outlier in this year's budget is in that bluish cash another piece there is a settlement that was done this year for the fire station which is a nine hundred eighty five thousand dollar settlement for the two fire stations and i'll get into that a little bit more in a second ok so i'm going to skip the next page and then and the next page after that and i'll go to the one looks like little bit of a table there you go mike that's great so what what this page it talks about one hundred six million dollars and it talks about how we spend the money so the first page is how do we generate the funds and this page is how do we spend funds this is the ok so again the overall budget is one hundred six million i mentioned before there was  five thousand dollar fire settlement which is basically just putting being put directly into doing some fixes to the to the fire departments part of the capital budget so the increase you see by the way of six percent versus last year would have been five percent if it weren't for that fire settlement  but you can see there's a meaningful increase in the overall budget by the way and that's largely funded by the override that we did now the budget of one hundred six million which you see right here pieces essential what we call fixed costs and then the operating budget the fixed costs are about seventy percent of the fixed costs are either pension or debt all right and there's some other things like minuteman in the roads that are in the fixed costs and then the operating budget is the school budget the town budget in the capital the capital budget those three areas will town and capital add up to the eighty nine point seven million now the other thing that i mentioned very quickly is if you look at the group rates for the school budget in the town budget it looks like the school budget is growing very little in the town budget is growing a lot now the reason why that happening is because we are actually continuing the process of consolidating the find the facilities departments between the school side and the town side and so we've moved about two point four million dollars worth of cost that is traditionally been in the school budget this year has moved into the town side budget right it's in the public services department so what you can see there is that the school budget would have grown by six percent and the town side would have grown by four percent if it weren't for that shift to place so just our body understands both sides are actually growing it in a meaningful way and the capital budget which looks like it's growing enormously by forty five percent that's again because of that nine hundred eighty five thousand dollars it is in the capital budget so if you were to take out that nine hundred eighty five thousand dollars and you were to do a little bit more of sort of apples to apples comparison from last year the right way to think about the capital budget is it's going up by about seven point two percent so it's going up a bit so just very briefly on the next page this is the t sixteen point six million in fixed costs mike if you would just there you go ok so the pensions represents about seven million dollars of that sixteen point six million and so when you get the united pension and debt you get about seventy percent of the overall fix cost state charges or m t a charges the roads number the one point six million is is the roads override both the old one and the money from the new override and you see a minuteman in there so these are these are the big chunks of fixed cost and like if you wouldn't hit one hit in the next things you can see that article ten has a number of different motions in it's an article ten and article fourteen basically is the entire budget so something like ninety five percent of the budget is in article ten and roughly five percent of the bar budget is in entire budget ok so if you would skip the next page and go to the the one before that sorry mike that ok so this is this is the again the the lion's share of overall you can see that roughly fifty five percent of the budget is in the public schools department writes a policy the school of our represents about fifty five percent of the operating budget forty eight starts at fifty six percent and then forty four percent essentially is the rest and once again you can see that articles ten and fourteen are essentially where we're doing all the all the expenditure so whether it's schools or whether it's public safety which is fire and police or whether it's public services which is public works and community development and then facilities as we just talked about and then the other is that of the bulk of the the budget that's where the expenditure goes yes absolutely for those who are new to town meeting we have separate votes on each of these areas public safety public service and general government so if you have a question on a particular department you would ask of laugh when we were considering the particular then the subcommittee responsible for a particular area three people may be on that subcommittee and open up a dialogue with them and so that he would approach it in that way i mean there to be informed enough to have an intelligent recommendation about changing money here or there over my time in town meeting there have been occasions where that's happened but they've been only a few and it has not been a large amount of money so i think the impact has to be a whole period of time helen did you want to say something ellen ellen reminded the town reminded me i want coach from the town clerk of course reminded me that if you are making a motion to appropriate additional money for a given project or department it has to have a source in other words it doesn't come out of the sky so to speak so it's and that's of course a debate because is it free cash is it funding you know the part or whatever but it has to have you want to pick up on question i mean what i would say that what you said is right in terms of if you want to influence the process i would suggest doing it throughout the process so whether that's by speaking to myself or members of the work committee or speaking to the relevant department you know so if you're really passionate about sidewalks it's you know it's the community development and department that's going to be thinking about that in public works so you know that you would want to talk to either michael mcnamara precinct district seven i was wondering i really like the pie graphs we have here and it's very important because the it clarifies what everything is sort of the war i was wondering i know there have been a lot of talk about the special education budget and try to make sure that people who need it will get the resources possible and they've been very large part as running since the public schools is such a big a big chunk there is a way we can sort of break it down into maybe different parts that the the public schools  be using that for a way to address that with your committee or a sure so there are two high level things that say number one i actually will get into more detail around the school department directly so i'll do that today the other thing that i would say that something important for people to understand is that whereas much much of the budget actually is allocated to specific line items and there's relatively little latitude for that money to be shifted around so if you're the police chief for example the money that's put into salaries can't be moved into you know later on to buy uniforms for example that that money is basically allocated to specific line items the school budget is actually very different the school budget is given a one large number and then and then base of the school committee has the power to allocate that money in the way that it chooses so there is a school budget that is very detailed in the school budget is described in the work committee report but ultimately over time the school the school committee and the school department has a great deal of authority about how that money is spent so it's useful for people to understand that they  say that the municipal budgets are all level service or better in terms of the funding and then the because we have significant overall dollars that's also allowed us to actually fund increase in romans in the schools seeing if you increase is in special instruction and put a bunch more money in for roads and sidewalks we're spending about two and half million dollars so mike if you were in my going to the next page what i want to do is i'm going to focus now drill down a bit on free cash because this is a topic that i kind of do at a very high level and i did some of this actually in may town meeting but i want to drill down a bit more on free cash because not only is it relevant for us now but as we think about the question of general stabilization funds which will come before us in june the general topic i think is relevant so what this chart does and i realize it's got a lot going on is that it basically says that last year what happened with free cash so we started out with seven point five million dollars of free cash that was certified by the department of revenue in july two thousand and fourteen right so we start out of that seven point five nine and we can see if we spend it down over the course of last year we'll talk about that and how we did that a minute to get to the three point three million which is in the middle right so we spent it on a variety of things and then what we did is we replenished that free cash after the budget cycle was over with or we replenish it essentially with either revenues that were in excess of forecast or expense turned back so for example let's say a teacher retires and we are able to replace that position immediately or a firefighter retires or we're not able to replace that position immediately that's money that actually is not spent that we thought was going to be spent so you can see what happens is this classic trend of we spend down free cash to a certain extent and then we build it back up in the form of replenishment and i'll talk a bit more about that cycle over time now what you can see is that we've also established a guideline and we did this last year three to five percent guideline of the amount of free cash that we wanted to maintain and that's three to five percent of last year's budgets so in the budget in the previous year was a little under one hundred million so what that meant was that three percent guideline was two point nine and the five percent guideline was four point eight million so we did as we spent it on some standard things that we'd typically spend on so we put money towards the fiscal sixteen budget to the operating budget and we also put it we're the stabilization fund so those are things that we generally always do we always put money towards the operating budget and we typically always put money towards the open stabilization fund what we also did is we put some money towards things that were one time uses so we so last year we put money towards government center of the one point three million and we put seven hundred fifty thousand dollars roughly toward snow and ice because we had an enormous amount of snow right so you can see that free cash gets used typically for more standard things that happen although every time and then also some more one time uses that took us down to three point three and then built back up to seven point six knots if you go the next page you can see we're free cash is right now so this we start with a seven point six one more one more area ok so we start with a seven point six is where we ended last year all right and we say what's good what so what's happening with free cash this year so first of all in may we already allocated one point four five million towards the general modulars that's an example of a one time use of free cash and then what you see is the fiscal seventeen allocation towards the operating budget one point seven million and then  of three hundred seventeen so those two standard things that we can do and the fiscal seventeen allocation if you go for one one click mike you can see that the fiscal seventeen allocation is actually in article twelve that we will do and the  allocation is in article fifteen so that's going towards a stabilization fund so we will vote those two things or not at town meeting and in now what all what that will do if you hit one more but mike you see that the guideline is now three million to five million because last year's budget was one hundred million so it's pretty simple math three million to five million is actually the guideline now so we're kind of like right in that middle of the with four point one million that's left over now one of the w articles article nineteen and that one article says we want to take one point one million and put that of free cash and put that into the general stabilization fund so you can imagine if you take one point one million away that puts you at three million which is right at the floor of what that guideline is and so tommy will have to decide in june whether or not we're going to take that one point one million base and move it from one savings account which is free cash into another savings account which is the general stabilization fund and the intention of that is to simply extend the impact of the override all right we already put one point six seven four million into that general stabilization fund last year and there's another small chunk in article eleven that puts one hundred fifty thousand into the general stabilization fund so if we were to do all three of those things then we would have about two point nine million in general stabilization fund all right now one last thing on general stabilization fund and this is true for all stabilization funds it takes a two thirds vote to put money into it and it takes a two thirds vote of money to take money out of it so the difference between putting that one point one million into the general stabilization fund is that we have to requires a two thirds vote to get it out as opposed to a fifty percent vote to get it out  free cash right now if you go to the next page what you can see is what's been happening with free cash over the course of two thousand and nine to two thousand and fifteen so you can see that the last two numbers that we talked about the seven point four and the seven point six are the fourteen and fifteen number so if you remember we started seven point four six we went down and then we went back up to seven point six so we actually ended up higher than when we started out and if you look at that it going back to two thousand and nine free cash has actually been growing over that period of time and that's one of the reasons why in two thousand and fourteen we said hey let's establish a guideline for how much free cash we want to keep around who we want to have seven eight ten million dollars in free cash we said no that's probably more free cash than we need as a rainy day fund we want to have between three and five percent which is why we just out of that guideline between the board of selectmen and the work committee ok the next page and this is a little bit complicated but this just talks about how that down and up has happened over the course of the last seven years or so in the six years actually so the orange bars or the reddish bars are the replenishment that's the up right that happens each year and the yellow bars are the down that's how much we spent in a given year and so in any year where the orange bar is bigger than the yellow bar that means that free cash has grown so you can see for example in two thousand and fifteen the orange is a little bit more than the yellow which is the reason why for cash went up a little bit but in two thousand and ten it was actually him we had a lot more free cash that we replenish than we actually used and so therefore free cash actually grew by quite a bit in two thousand and ten overall on average we tend to replenish over the course the last six years about three million dollars in free cash right we tend to use about two point two million in free cash between those normal uses and the one time uses that's what we tend to do that doesn't mean we have to do that but that's what's been happening the fine so the general stabilization fund last year had the one point six million in article nineteen potentially will add another one point one million article eleven might add one hundred fifty thousand so you again talk about two point nine million in general stabilization fund any time we are spending money whether it's from a general stabilization fund or from free cash that is more in any given year than we are replenishing we think about that for a second you spend more than you were planning  is a finite thing you cannot do that forever right so we only have a certain amount of money in the bank and if we spend it down it's eventually gone so we as a community to be thoughtful about how over the course of the next couple years do we think about extending the impact of the override whether that's through the general stabilization fund or how much money we use from that and that's a big issue for the world to me to think about and that will be a big issue for tommy to think about might just want to pick up quickly on mike's point about the two thirds vote in town meeting  my experience over the years is it takes a broad consensus of town meeting to get a two thirds vote significantly bigger hurdle these numbers wise but really terms of the sense of town meeting so when and when when money is going into it in this case a general stabilization fund that requires a two thirds vote to get it now that is a protection of that not me versus something that would only take a majority vote so i just put that context in place based on my own experience ok so there are any other questions or much come out of the mike is what i do is i'm a talk about long term tr thousand and nine that number was a little bit under one point five million all right so that's the year that was right after the recession so free cash for punishment is not here in future we're going have a big number like we had last year so we want to be thoughtful about that what i would say from my own personal experience in this is just me speaking as a semi knowledgeable person if we are spending if we are using between let's say two million dollars and three million dollars in total in free cash that's something we can you know especially visit between a million five and two that's something we can i think comfortably manage once you start going between two and three now you start getting into the zone of where you might not replenish it if you start using more than three million dollars at any point whether it's a combination of free cash and general stabilization you're now running a stabilization fund is it as it sounds that we can use it for anything or any kind of policy or unstated limitation as to what we can spend it is exact is exactly as you said it can be used for any purpose there is no there is no guideline or  sink when just building that salmond's question do you remember what the kind of under the verbiage of the override if you will maybe it's not how it was real how the vote was actually written but kind of how the the language that was around the override vote it was sort of i can remember it was like this override will be but provide funds for like five years so there was some period of time to do  you recall that i'm wondering whether so he said you know is there a policy and you're saying it's two thirds voted with but is there could one say that that money in theory would be accessed during the time period that people thought they were voting it as covered but it doesn't and yeah i think that part of what was said during the override period was that we wouldn't we the four point five million that was chosen by the selectmen was i think chosen with part and i'm selectman but i think part of the logic for why they chose that number was we didn't need that much money in fiscal sixteen so we would take a certain chunk of that the one point six seven four and then we would bank it so mike if you go the next page we would bank that one point six or into general stabilization fund with the explicit intent of using that for future years right then we thought that we would need the full four point five million which is in fact what we're doing in fiscal seventeen and that is in fact we're doing and the reason why i think that's true is that the number of students has increased in a significant way the the special education costs increase in special instructions increase in a significant way that we are spending more money on roads and sidewalks are the things that we thought we really needed for have in fact been needed in  seventeen part of the logic was that we would then take some chunk or all of that one point six seven four and spend it in fiscal eighteen so the thinking was that it would get us at least we were thinking through fiscal sixteen seventeen eighteen i think one of the open questions for the town meeting is because we it's not easy to do overrides is how do we take that and try to make that last as long as possible one of things it's uncertain is whether or not revenue will grow more or less than then the financial task force forecasts we not know whether or not cost will grow larger or faster or slower than what they forecast those are things that are a bit on known will know more in a year than we knew two years ago so can i ask a follow up here so i guess i feel to some extent i feel like obligation i mean i advocated as an individual for the override and i feel like in talking to people about you know a lot of the discussion was about it would be over some period of time so you just refresh my memory so from that point of view i feel like an obligation to put that money in to personally like into the stabilization fund but i also would like and i guess this comes through at the scene but i would also like it to be also  available to come out so it takes a two thirds vote to come out you're saying so inputting it in sort of being cognizant that it also takes two thirds vote to come out part of the kind of deal if you will in sort of doing the multi year override was we would save the money and then we would use it so and yeah that's what i think would be a i think you're getting into the discussion that will have on the floor of town meeting and so i think you know the the  work committees perspective which by the way voted unanimously to support putting that one point one million into the general stabilization fund in part because it is sort of region is consistent with the public logic that that money would be set aside to extend the override at some level it doesn't really matter taking it from one savings account to another but it is a fair point that it actually has a higher threshold so i think that is just a debate that we will have on timing for and johnny will decide what to do helen sugarman precinct  eight just two questions to be sure i'm clear on things you've gone through yep you had in the bar chart i guess a couple of back the coming out of free cash the fiscal year  two thousand and seven yeah the fiscal year to seventeen allocation so is that what you were just referring to now from the override because i'm not really clear on what that is no is that so right so what happens is it has been our history for as long as i've been around that we've tended to allocate summer between a million dollars and two million dollars in free cash into the operating budget no mike was chair before me and so mike maybe you can comment on what that number used to be before but that's been a common practice at least in the last ten years that's a bit about right so typically what happens is we allocate between a million and two million dollars in free cash towards the operating budget that's not one point seven million and the logic would be that we would do the same thing in subsequent years when i was talking about the one point six seven four that's the number on the other page it's in the general stabilization fund currently the plan the rough plan is that the free cash allocation in fiscal eighteen will be one point three million from free cash and the full one point six seven four will be put in i don't know if that's actually the right answer i don't know if that's what will end up being proposed that's the really rough draft from before but overall w put those two things together you get a number that's pretty big and so i would say that that's some of the red to think very hard about but that's just a general thing that over time generally some amount of free cash goes into the operating budget and that's what suggestion that everything that's capital is discretionary or are there not discretionary items which are somewhere else in a different part of the pie i think one might argue that all of the capital budget is discretionary although some things are a bit more you could argue necessary than others i mean like for example if the boiler goes out and the school doesn't have any heat then it may not be all that discretionary but basically the capital budget committee oversees that two point six million dollars and says how should that be spent and you'll see an article sixteen in emory mahoney's the chair will get up and talk about exactly what that is so that doesn't include by the way the one point six million for the roads which is the second motion of article fourteen that was in part of the issue is that you know whenever you're forecasting the revenue side you don't want to try to forecast exactly what you think it's going to be next year because if you're wrong it's really really disruptive you know if  forecast more money than you actually get you would really have to go and cut everything in the middle of the year so it's really painful on the on the expense side it is inevitable that you have turned backs because largely because people leave so people retire or people to other communities and when a firefighter leaves it takes two years to replace a firefighter so you cannot actually just replace that person immediately so inevitably what we see every year is there is a couple million dollars call it three million dollars on average of a combination freaking ourselves saying you're going to have to is so plus money come in and we can use it to replenish our free cash account again so in some ways i think we're counting on that to come in so i guess we look at its development slide of sweet cash over the years what does it do if if it suddenly goes from growing growing growing to seven million and now suddenly goes down to five million whatever yeah  scheduled down to that four point one or three depending we're talking about so let's say if we put the one point one million into the general stabilization fund and it goes all the way down to three if we were to replenish the average that would take us back up to six so you'd see that for the first time  actually be down now there is you know there is money in theory that's coming in from cushing village so but we isn't guaranteed yet so you know there are things that are on interest a painted which is one of the reasons why again that revenue comes in greater than you might expect of the to override four point five million dollars can you is it possible to do a graphic that actually shows where that money is over f y sixteen seventeen eighteen i'm a visual person so i'm trying to sort of bouncing around we're going to take this money we're going to put here here here can you show that to explain to people where that overripe money is  where that is so what i what i would tell you and so it's a fair question i mean we can think about that what i would tell you is that this is where the money goes from the override so what i'm about to talk about is these are the reasons why we had an override and the reasons why we continue to i'm going to go ahead and i can i can i just to add one thing to the previous question which is very important question i think in the slide that might showed as a growth of pre k this is a period of economic growth not dramatic but the economy's recovering from the recession where your question becomes absolutely critical is in recessions and i was on the warn me i think in three recessions over a period of fifteen years and the question you raise becomes a hot topic because we don't want to we're having to cut the budget anyway because revenues are climbing so we don't want to have the luxury of a conservative revenue estimate because that means immediate cuts in services of the discussion and employee compensation is on the next page so competition represents about sixty percent of the budget right so it's a very large chunk of where we spend our money and because we're a town of homes and we're not aggregate is sixty eight percent of the budget that is growing faster than our revenue that is fundamentally putting pressure on the budget all right so for example salary growth in the school budget grew at five point four percent in from two thousand and thirteen to two thousand and seventeen right when that happens when when when expenses are growing at a faster rate than our revenue on average and that by the way partly is because of headcount has to be really clear that creates pressure on the budget now what just the people understand what's going on in the school budget is that we are increasing and i talked about a second the number of students in a substantial way we've increased the number of teachers to keep up with the number of students so our student teacher ratio has not changed in a meaningful way in part because of the overall right but what also happens is that we have very meaningful growth in the salaries because of the step in lean structure that exists which is common to all towns all right but that gro then mitigated by attrition so when teachers go those teachers tend to be more senior more highly paid and they tend to be replaced with more junior teachers that are two that are lower paid and so that combination of relatively fast growth and compensation and people going away and coming  a lower level allows us to basically say it only five point four percent growth when you come again combine it with the growth in the number of people all right so the bottom line i guess what i would say is the negotiations that are happening around the teacher salaries which represent the largest chunk of growth of money in the overall budget is a very important thing all right and so the school committee is responsible for that but if you said to me why is the single most important thing that will affect the budget that is maybe the single most important thing that will affect the budget which is how fast do salaries grow ok so we move on to and roman and special instruction right we've seen meaningful growth as i think many mean i know in the number of students that are in the district there been six hundred seventy five additional k through twelve students in the last have meaningful growth and in special instruction instruction which is special education and english language learners which is english as a second language that grew last year at twelve point five percent that's larger than the two in after three and a half percent in revenue so again anytime a big number is growing larger than revenue that's creating pressure on the budget special education costs alone grew one point seven million dollars alone in two thousand and seventeen that is the single largest line an increase in the entire hundred six million dollar budget so when we say where did the money the money from the over i go that's a big chunk of where it went and that was exactly what the overall it was designed to do which is say we're growing a number of students and we're growing amount of special instruction yellow and special education we need money for that and that's where the money is going now there is a circuit breaker money and federal grant money that comes to cover part of that but the reason why this is called unfunded mandates is because they're not fully funded by those grants from either the state level or the federal level we do get money to mitigate it but a lot of that money comes out of the out of the budget of ourselves and you see that the twelve point five percent growth in special instruction is meaningfully larger than the two point six percent increase in regular instruction in two thousand and seventeen mike if you go to the next page you can show you the the impact of mandated costs and i just to be really clear i'm not trying to make a value judgment in any way shape or form about about mandated costs this is a sensitive topic but i think it's important for people to be aware of the facts and terms of what's actually happening with the budget what this is saying is that out of the fifty million dollars roughly or fifty two if you want to count the facilities money this is the this money is being spent on regular instruction and this money is being spent on special starting twenty four point six or twenty one point seven on regular and sixteen point eight on on special instruction now just to be really clear this is only the essential the instruction cost so it's the combination of teachers and substitutes and benefits and transportation and yell and out of district two tuitions this does not include overhead and and administrative costs it does not this is not include the you know the superintendent's office for example or the principals or athletic departments right and it's a little bit unfair to say that we spend six thousand dollars per student's all right on regular instruction and forty one thousand for special instruction because i'm not really counting the overhead fairly but even if you were to say take all of the overhead hundred percent of it and decided to write one instruction that's twenty seven it's twenty two thousand seventy one dollars per student so this number goes up to a little under nine thousand dollars from six thousand versus forty one on average right so it's a non trivial difference ok if you go to the next page the forty one thousand on average actually varies quite a bit by different types of special instruction all right and this again is just the reality that people need to understand because we have an obligation to provide high quality education to every single student in the community and some students cost more than others and that's just the reality  there are four thousand students in regular instruction and there are four hundred and one i believe if i had four and three that are in special instruction those that are actually educated within the districts include what's called special education inclusion they cost on average about twenty six thousand dollars between per student between the instruction costs and the transportation cost which is just using the average of about one hundred three dollars per student for transportation whether it's when you  start moving people outside of the district whether it's in the form of collaboratives or lab or private placements where you can see is that not only does the instruction cost go up a lot but the transportation cost goes up a lot all right so when we see for example that even a handful of students that actually are in private placements where there are forty one that cost on average ninety seven thousand dollars per student just a handful can very quickly actually alter the budgets and we say you know do we just spend you know do we forecast up to the limit well what happens is a couple students come in and suddenly it costs a couple hundred thousand dollars and that has to be absorbed by the school department all right so again i'm not trying to make a value judgment about this i'm simply saying that this is a this is actually what is happening ok now the one last thing i'll say about that is that the superintendent i think understands very well if you go back to one second mike that it costs a lot more and potentially it's not even necessarily the best solution sometimes it's the best solution for a student actually be educated closer to home next to neighbors and friends all right so there is the solution has to be at each individual student about what's the right answer for the student but there are instances where a student potentially can be educated within the district which is in some cases better for the student and some cases better from a financial perspective that decision again has to be made first and foremost as to what's right for the student but part of what's challenging about moving students from the right side to the left hand side is that we don't even have enough space right so part of what happens with the new high school in the modules in the way that is potentially create even more space to potentially have more students educated within the district it's very challenging for a superintendent in the school department to even think about having people more educate in the district when there's no space at all so the bellman high school is actually important part of actually addressing that issue ok all right on the capital side of me people know that we our roads are not the greatest under invested in the roads and sidewalks for decades and we had a couple of rides that failed to try to pay for that in this last override of course put money towards the road so we've got about two and a half million dollars towards roads and sidewalks and that is about as much money as we can spend in the months that work can be done on the roads and sidewalks i've had various people come up to me and say hey why can't we spend twice as much money on the roads to fix them faster or spend much more money on the sidewalks to fix them faster the challenge is that there's literally only so much work that they can do we're spending more money on roads and sidewalks than we ever have and so at least in the near term it's not easy to spend more and i think that that's a question that for us as a community over time can we spend more if we plan over a longer period time but right now we're kind of doing a doing right we want to do a better job of helping planning for preventive preventative maintenance and we've got some big projects between the high school the police department the library the d p w the need to be addressed as you know we spent one point seven five million in may from would fall know the residents of the whole class neighborhood are petitioning to have those roads become public roads which in theory absolutely support americans planning mechanism i understand that they would have to pay for the upfront costs to bring those roads up to grade and then that would be just them arriving roads that want to become public yes we're saying i'm going to can you do you wonder if you may not know the answer this question what's the mechanism for funding that might do you know because i'm not an expert in that i don't know when you have to know you would you mind coming up to the mike thank you all right so last topic is pensions and again as a as a hot topic in town we're spending about seven million dollars in fiscal seventeen on pensions if you remember that was the tallest bar in the fixed cost chunk that i was talking about earlier that is a seven percent increase over fiscal sixteen and the forecast is to increase that number in fact if you go to the next page mike this this number here which seems a little bit over because that's including enterprise mon so this money which is this is actually seven million more that for the town itself is growing too on that chart about sixteen million what that actually means from a town perspective it's just under fourteen million that will come out of the budget so if you think about an incremental seven million dollars that we're going to have to spend between two thousand and seventeen and fiscal two thousand and twenty seven each year that is a non trivial amount of money that we're going to have to find all right and so part of the question if you read the pension report that the work committee generated in november and it's on the website is the retirement board controls this funding schedule this growth and seven percent and so one of the questions that will be thought about as the new actuarial valuation happens in the fall is does it make sense to potentially slow the rate of growth so instead of growing at seven percent maybe grow at five or four and push out that just a little bit maybe a year or two which actually will meaningfully decrease the amount of money we have to spend each year on pensions while the sil's at the same time funding it by the two thousand and forty deadline with lots of room to spare so i think that's a question that we that we will want to think about but again the retirement board is the one that actually controls that so i can go back a page we're on track to the funded by twenty twenty seven right years so there's one that's coming up in the fall and the work committee will continue to work with the retirement board on that so that's that's pension but as you can tell that's a big number and it's going to continue to put pressure on the budget growing again faster than revenue seven percent lastly is zero pad which is other post employee  benefits which is largely retirees health care but it has some other retiree insurance that know that notion basically has a pay as you go piece and that has two point eight million dollars in the overall budget and  there is a there's money that goes towards the unfunded liability which is a big number of one hundred seventy three million dollars that you see there and that stabilization fund three seventeen that we talked about in article and fifteen that one goes towards the stabilization fund and so the thinking is is that we pay down the pension side keep putting money into the into the stabilization fund which currently has a couple million dollars in it and then we transition that argument money we're putting towards pensions into into a pad once the unfunded liability is paid off so that's the strategy to the town is using at the moment and one of the big on knowns is what is this really what this one hundred seventy three million dollar unfunded liability that's a thing that is continuing to be studied right now by a board selectman study group and part of what we've seen already is that we're using the actual firm is using average cost per pen for retiree costs for across all communities as opposed to the cost for belmont retirees and when a neighboring community think it was needed and looked at that they saw that their overall liability went down by i think like forty million dollars some very substantial number and so just going from looking at the average for the state versus their own number had a very substantial impact on their overall liability their unfunded liability the second thing that's worth pointing out is that this liability assumes that the cost of health care is growing at eight percent then seven percent then six percent then five percent for evermore now in the current budget we're assuming two and after cent growth the last several years was either a percent growth so if our health care costs grows at less than that sept eight seven six five five five five five five then the liability is actually lower than the one seventy three so the study group is looking at those two big things if we use our cost instead of average and if we think about what  a reasonable growth for health care what might be what might that unfunded liability might be so those are the big issues i would say on open mics mike couple of points on that i'm on the working group that mike mentioned ralph jones chairs that he'll be making a brief report at town meeting on the status of our working group i think it's doing some very important work for the town secondly i would just want to underscore the point a combination of the work of the board of selectmen the school committee and the warrant committee going back to really about twelve years now we have made a successful concerted effort in this town to lower the rate of growth of health care costs i don't have time to get into all of the initiatives that are part of that but we really as a town have stood out in taming these costs which were growing seven eight ten percent a year with revenue growing three and a half or four in some years more than ten percent so it's a huge success story and i just wanted to underscore that and there's a lot of credit for all of the bodies that  collaborated completely agree other questions or