good evening and welcome i'm diane meyerhoff posts for tonight's essex town f y twenty budget and ballot item presentation part of challenge seventeen's ongoing town meeting coverage tonight show is being aired live on channel seventeen  we welcome your comments and questions please join the conversation at eight six to three nine six six tonight i'm joined by evan teach the town in village unified manager and max levy the select board chair thank you both so much for coming out invitation we really appreciate your coming out and you're going to tell us primarily about the budget tonight i believe yes here we'd like to walk you through the budget kind of what the objectives were to  it and some of the details but try to stay kind of high level ok we appreciate that ok see that and of course we'd love folks to call call in ask questions comments eight six to three nine six six and this is this presentation is probably being done a yeah it's monday monday and there are for that day there are three articles that we're going to be going over the first article this is accepting the reports of the officers ok usually not too controversial  it has been in the past at least one time and then article two is a vote on the on the budget and the budget amount that the select board has proposed is fourteen million seven hundred thirty thousand six hundred forty nine dollars ok and then the third article we have is called public to be heard and that's where the public and speak whatever to us about anything that they'd like to talk to us about and we find that to  dinner and that starts at six thirty and it's held at the essex high school and people can come in there's no charge for the meal i want say it's a free milk because the taxpayers pay for it but there's no charge for the meal as you come there and  it's a great way for people to just to you know get to see each other that they haven't seen maybe for a while and i enjoy going table to table and welcoming people and you know we get it's a small turnout when you look at the number of voters but they turned out that are they they're very passionate and they they do they know what's going on good so that's been i said we actually borrowed that from the that community dinner from the village they were doing that for many many years and we thought that that would be a good thing to also adopt and it's been well received so i did prepare a slide presentation and this is one that i do at tell meeting to to make sure the people little late on you know if you eat with your meal goes a little long on monday night you know you know you'll have it here that's right exactly that ok so this is just to show the the consolidated services and alignment that we've been doing over the past many years there's the police the senior bus those have been community wide in essex for for many years but more recently about five or six years ago we started with the unified manager for both the village and town and then and then and then that kicked off consolidation of other departments in there they're listed up here i don't want to go through all of them but they're there up  there last year we did the fire department alignment of pay and training because our fire departments work very closely together in is working to get them nicely aligned and that's worked out well  in so this budget is the first budget with the full year worth of that alignment so this what are we doing in this year's budget we're looking at co locating the record departments  the village and the town each have their own departments but trying to deliver services in a better way for the community one idea that was brought to us from the directors of the rec departments was to co locate it's seventy five maple street which is currently where the village rec department is and by doing the colocation this isn't consolidating the departments is just merely let's sit in the same building so that you can have one office that people can go to you can have one phone number for people to call for rock one brochure to go out instead of the two mailings that each one was doing you can have one website one registration system and you can eliminate the confusion about which which building do i need to go to if i want to indian broke pass if you went to the village they tell us why you got it on the town so from a delivery of service perspective we think this is a smart thing to do and we hope the people will appreciate that too being able to have one stop shopping but again this is only co location there is a communications position there that both the village in town are going to pay for to help with the communication coming out of their wrecked apartments and is that a new position that will be a new part time position or can they miss anything people know and as i said we've been doing this consolidation of services now for a number of years and one of the things people like to know is is it saving money it's allowing us to do a lot of things a of things smarter and better by working together and sharing resources equipment sometimes and even people but we can put our finger on some real hard dollars of where some savings are coming in and looking at the employee budgets from twenty fourteen to twenty nineteen looking at what the community as a whole say for both the town municipality and the village it's not chump change it's over two million dollars from just this consolidation of services to work smarter together instead of having two isolated things going let's just work together tell me something sure how how far along are you on the sort of alignment consolidation idea another is you say it's two million dollars is that you know ninety percent done is it fifty percent them well to you know what's the end game well i guess we'll say let's say let's say i want to scale from from being separate to being completely to gather whether or not that really happens or not you know may not but well i could say that a part is out or not consolidating and that would be the record department the libraries fire department development i think that's it the development department is i think planning community community development planning and yeah yeah so those are the those are not consolidated ok and public works is sort of in that that forming stage ok they working together and aligning a lot of policies and procedures but they haven't officially been well we haven't combined the capital he says for both communities yet that's still out there you know and within each community where you can really point to really over two billion dollars of savings just by working smarter together so and just recently in the recent storms you know while they're not consolidated and true form they're working together so when the storm  the village had a piece of equipment that went down they called the town's mechanic he came and fixed a hydraulic line to get a truck back on the street and the town asked the village to cover a section of sidewalk and a piece of  plow route to be able to get it because they were stuck up in the northern part of the community that gets a lot more snow than the than the southeast part so they are working together to make it work and it is that really a new thing over the years i mean when they have in the past not a call one another it really didn't happen a whole lot of the passengers thing but it's it's wonderful to see the cooperation going back and forth and again these are the two million is really just the the easily measured things but there's a lot of things as ever was talking about that there are other benefits in addition to cost savings just working together smarter and cherry equipment and they are showing people you know the sort of common sense really you know one with one would think that would be the outcome but it isn't always the outcome right think sometimes it does it does it doesn't so if we look at this budget which is there for you two thousand and twenty the savings for the community wide is about point seven million in this year and you can look at what part the town is saving because that's what we don't have to raise in taxes now in the current budget and that's about you know three hundred twenty one thousand dollars you know a lot of money that we don't have to raise by taxes because by consolidating we can avoid that so the consolidation doesn't stop the increase  in the growth of the the budget but it sort of bends that growth curve down and i'll show you some numbers about that in a moment so again in this budget we're saving three hundred twenty thousand just by working smarter and if we look at the budget objectives you know before the the budget process is going on with this like bore you want to know you know what it what are the objectives and one is to ensure continued delivery of  quality services and i tell meeting last year was very clear that we they wanted more police on the streets and were if you look at it per thousand people how many police officers we have we're way behind most of our sister communities here not that we want to catch up to them but we are way behind and we want to be able to do so proactive policing you know some traffic were checking businesses at night you know driving through and if you don't have enough police you really can't do that so it was clear they wanted more so i'll show you what in the in a moment when we did their service delivery efficiencies last year the as another one that that we're doing and the other thing that not all communities do but we feel is very important in essex is to focus on it anticipating future capital expenses you know you're going to need a new roof or new vehicles well start saving for it don't wait until you need it and then go out and ask for a bond so that's what we do and we save for future expense expenses for built in vehicles and equipment you know cars and trucks road maintenance and paving building upkeep we have over thirty buildings you know a lot of buildings out there and we need to keep those up and  stormwater storm or infrastructure is one we know we have to do because the state you know permit says you know you will clean up any broke you will clean up sunderland broke and we totally agree yes that has to be done to get to the lake clean so we have to put money away but we also leverage that money with grants so that we can take like a you know paid twenty percent of off in the what the storm water bill would be and leverage that to get eighty percent paid for by  the growth but it does significantly bend it and when you can point to the two million dollars of savings or the three hundred twenty one thousand in this year's budget you know that's those are real numbers i'm sure that the voters appreciate that i think they do so those are our objectives and if we take a look at the hard numbers now this budget is fourteen million seven hundred and thirty thousand dollars and that's an increase of three hundred  seventy thousand from last year you do the math you see it's about two point six percent increase in the operating budget and when you look at the stimulated increase in the tax rate that's about two percent or so and again as i mentioned that nauseum i guess to say we see a consolidation this you know over three hundred thousand so when we dig a little bit deeper and say well what's causing that three hundred seventy thousand dollar increase and what this shows is the major increases that that effect that go into that three hundred seventy one thousand dollars and the top thing you see is salaries and including seasonal part time work is the majority and you'll see that continuously throughout the past but it's now salaries make up about forty percent of the increase in the total in the  overall budget but we also have storm water highway which is increasing you know ninety one thousand and that's for both the village stormwater highway and the town there's winter maintenance and summer construction costs that have increased that we have to account for and we need to take care of our our roads vehicles and equipment are up a little bit because last year we cut out i think it was thirty one thousand from the from that capital transfer for vehicles so we needed to catch up a little bit on that so that's that's in there but if we want to dig a little bit deeper down still let's take a look at the salaries and see since that's the majority of the increase what's driving that and the the salaries and benefits the change as you saw on the other page it's one hundred seventy seven thousand and that's about that's up about three stepping creases that were one hundred eighty nine thousand then you take away the savings from the staffing work that we did and it comes out hundred seventy seven thousand and this year the benefits actually went down going to ask you about health care because i thought that was going to be a driver for all actually went down to your one percent about twenty three thousand because again what you'll see in the next slide is that we if you have very senior people leaving and you hire more junior people at a different salary and sometimes the they don't have the family cost for the for the health care then your numbers can be significantly different or if you hire somebody with a big  lot this year they're down ok and i also took one position that was full time that had benefits and made it part time and so we get the savings of not having to provide health insurance for that particular  position right so speaking of the staffing changes as mentioned earlier for the police we took one unfilled lieutenant position you know higher level position and we exchange two patrol officers we took there were two very senior wonderful police officers very senior been here a long time really great who have retired and when those two retired we could actually bring in three patrol officers for very little increase over what we were paying for these two very senior you know experienced guys dispatch as you know is a critical piece of our functioning for the police department fire departments and essex rescue we need to add a part time for that to a point like three quarter  of a position so overall in the place we have two point seven increase we called f t e that's full time equivalents and then increase the total budget to add these two or three quarter police thirty thousand five hundred dollars because of the way again you know exchange will tend to position in the two retiring senior folks in i t i mentioned that the department said can they get away with not having that other person they stepped up to the plane say yes we can do it now we added i think seventy five hundred into the budget just in case they need to do some contract work that's unanticipated but that's a lot less and then having that person so that's a seventy one thousand  five hundred dollars savings in the staffing community development we went in was messy we went from a full time to a part time position because it was we had a vacancy we looked at the position said let's see if we can get it done with part time versus full time so that's a forty eight thousand for buildings i told you we have thirty some odd buildings throughout the structure restructuring  have a lot of and each different group like the libraries or the fire departments would take care of their own building and what we're looking to do is have a part time buildings manager come in and be able to to better take care of our buildings and to be more proactive rather than wait for things to break maybe be a little bit more proactive on that which can in the long term save some money not that the people who are taking care of those are doing a terrible job it's just that we think if we can coordinate that in the coordinate contracts who take care of h b a seethings for example sort of having independent ones maybe if we have a more blanket won't we get better terms and have somebody manage that so the idea is to to have a half time person come in for thirty seven thousand dollar increase for the staffing and then the rec department told you and the village department's going to fund part of it to to have consistent communication coming out there and we also change the senior center coordinator from a nonexistent to an they so in this particular position it's at the senior center and they do a lot of events that are not traditionally eight to five and sometimes they're on weekends and so we wanted the position to be able to be flexible and be able to work some extra over time which is more in line with the salary and so it's only able to flex its hours of better than a n so if you roll up all these you know the additions and subtractions for the a fulltime equivalents were up in this budget we're asking for two point three five full time equivalents with the total cost of forty thousand five hundred dollars to add these two and a third positions so again evan had some great ideas and how to you know how to make these things work where we can businesses wish they could do that yeah and again we go back to you know one of my first meetings was the town meeting last year when people said they had a sense that they just didn't see our police as often as they'd like come down their street and with a couple of very senior officers at the top and the pay scale looking to retire it gave us the opportunity to look at how the police department was doing their functions and whether they could take those positions and their benefits and work on getting a third and that extra officer while it doesn't seem like much is a lot when you're doing response times when you're doing visibility when you're doing door checks when you're doing community service that extra person allows us to be more visible to get down streets that maybe instead of seeing us once a day or twice a day three times a day you're going to see is the fourth in the fifth wow it sounds very safe many places are lucky if they see them once i'm thirty six square miles to cover a lot yeah so that that's the feeling and the goal and then we believe that this village core which is nice because you can get to a lot of places quickly but we don't have a lot of population out in the north and east so it's kind of hard to say but we want to keep up on the calls to be able to call for service and you know vermont has its issues with opioids and other things and so we just want to make sure that we're getting after it before it becomes something that we're going to have to work three times as hard when we could have been doing it yeah sooner and are you all part of the regional dispatch as well you're not we are in awe ok and but we are keeping an impact to the stacks and the estimated tax rate that this budget reflects is fifty two point three two cents that's an increase based from last year of of a penny of one  and two that's an increase of about twenty eight dollars per year for an average household some assumptions that go into that the average household home value is in our communities two hundred eighty thousand dollars and we're assuming our grand list will grow by a conservative one percent and i think for the past several years it's been more than that but we budgeted it conservatively and will say let's send to speed just one and as we've done in the past years though it's not great practice we've been using some money from our fund balance as a revenue and this year we're looking at reducing that down to one hundred thousand and when you look at those assumptions the average taxpayer would see a twenty eight dollars per year increase in their and the tax bill for the total year what do we do with that money well here yes this is a we always include this in our annual report and you know it it shows public safety is is a big one and that's our police and fire next you know people could guess would be highway right you got t you're the roads so that's that's another one but anyway it shows where you know for total tax bill a two hundred eighty thousand dollars house is four hundred sixty five dollars but if you live one so significantly less than than it was but that's yeah that's just to show where we were and that's that's kind of so twenty eight dollars per year for the average household ev l you did about house value about two hundred two hundred eighty thousand  average tax rate increase for the past what is it six years is to have her so this is so this is for i'm sorry to say we're doing two percent two percent or three days to present as proposed so it's a little bit less than what we've been so yes good question yeah yeah well it's it's interesting because they vary so much from different towns and i'm always curious you know well you know if you've got had some big ones do you have to do some small ones then because people just can't keep up if you just keep going well right yeah to the high school ok i think that all right and of course you always vote early because i always forget to mention that yes go to town hall at any point and that's becoming very popular as the percent is going way up at our town clerk that's