noting the time and the presence of a quorum I call this meeting of the act and finance committee to order my understanding is that this is being recorded and uh therefore we are good to go um first uh first item on the agenda is public participation I see a member
of the public running to the microphone the only person in the room uh good evening I'm David Mar Ben heider and one um it position um and as uh Scott recommended um uh delaying the
hiring um of the uh uh uh other few to uh midyear cancelling uh a small handful of projects and um some small reductions in supplies and things thank you
thank you select Martin um I know that a I know that a few of us were able to uh uh tune in to last night's select board meeting uh and that actually is a very good segue into the next item on the
agenda which is the budget review post ALG just by way of setting the setting the stage for this as you guys may recall at our last meeting before our last spa meeting before ALG we went around the table and asked what we what
we were expecting wanting out of the ALG process um and we reiterated that we were looking for a 3% to stay in the 3% range um U Scott and I presented that to the LG um it is safe to say was not met
with an abundance of cheers and joy um but um but I'm happy to see that they clearly are are listening and have started to uh started to uh pair things back so by way of quick reminder I
believe we were at uh 4 4.8 something like that 4.56 they cut it down to 3.81 sorry I overshot 4.56 down to 3. 81 um and that is you know they're
halfway there in my in my mind um so I definitely do want to uh point out that yes change has happened since our last meeting that's a good thing this is this is definitely the right direction this is what we're looking for
uh I guess what I'd be what I'm going to open up to to the committee is do we feel that this is the number that we are comfortable with and want to go back to consensus for or do we wish to do we continue to wish to hold to our point of view of
3% uh I would also add that um they are still adding new Personnel they're still still adding new FTE in this budget which um I I clearly have heard and I
clearly understand the argument although I don't buy it that that they have been on hold and that's a form of cut uh but having Rising FTE the year after an override um does not feel like
level services to me um that said I would like to open up the uh open up the table uh Scott is there anything that you wish to add from the ALG meeting or do you want to want me to just head it over to the other people who may have listened to the meeting last night very good anybody else who listened to the
meeting last night wish to he in way in I see one raised hands first of all if you missed last night's meeting it went five hours before I gave up after midnight and I think they were still going no they gble to close at 12:22 oh then I only missed
the last 22 minutes okay it started at 7 and I bailed somewhere around midnight but but um around around the 11:00 time frame is when they got to the um uh budget and um I took notes um uh David
is correct uh and accurate and let me just put a little more meat on that bone um the way they are uh cutting from 4.56 down to 3.81 is uh about
$290,000 in cuts um to staff uh one is uh the new firefighter uh one of the two new firefighters they were proposing so they're cutting one keeping the other one is a Help Desk position and the
third is a digital Communications position um they're also reducing funding for uh a police Lieutenant um and a benefits coordinator and election workers um
uh so that doesn't change FTE per se but um uh it has some budget impacts and they're reducing the line items for some supplies and equipment um when it came to the capital budget they're cutting that by 175,000 um and um what's proposed last
night and accepted was uh cutting some building improvements um some of the replacement for town meeting Clicker uh vegetation management and uh turnout gear for the firefighters and
complicating the cuts that they are trying to make they also announced last night that the health insurance increase is bigger than they had projected at the previous ALG meeting and so they had to absorb another
160k on top of what they had estimated so um when you wrap it all together they they wrestled late at night with a lot of tough issues and um
um that can't be an easy assignment to to to deal with now where do we go from here we got during our budget hearings this one little sheet of paper there was
FTE by Department including new positions and FY 26 and other funding sources so I went through that today as a sort of a refresher and one of the things
that Jason's already alluded to and I I I think um we need to discuss tonight is yeah they've cut three FTE but they were were asking for an increase of 5.89 s
FTE so you know they cut three maybe we should take a look at the three that are going on top of the workforce um but as I was looking at that and trying to figure out where they
were um what the trends were I was um surprised I hadn't seen this earlier so let me share with you some really weird um Trends um one of the things we haven't talked
about is that the land use Department used to have 1528 FTE in fiscal 24 and is down to 10
so not every Department's gotten bigger some actually got smaller another department like that is Public Works in fiscal year 24 they had 41 FTE currently they've got
34 and one of the things that that then makes it hard to deal with is if you deal with averages you look at the bottom line and say okay we've got six new and okay they cut three and what about the other three the answer is
there's a lot of movement going going along so while those have been going down operations has jumped from 5.3 FTE up to 14.3 operations
um the uh looking at the order chart for land use the health division was reallocated under the health and human services department getting an FY 25 so that is the why land went from
1528 down to 10.5 and it's on page 58 of the budget yeah that's the trend I mean that's that's but stuff is moving around which is the point I'm going to try to make here gotcha okay I mean bottom line is
we had 222 employees a couple years ago and now we have a budget of 225 or so so we're up three over the last couple of years but that hides the fact that a
lot of people are being reassigned there have been uh several reorgs the Council on Aging is now part of the Health and Family Services um HR has moved to finance uh veterans has moved to uh Health and Family
Services um and so one of the things that I think we can go back to the finance commit or the the finance the the select board with the finance committee point of view is you have a lot of really Dynamic
things going on here things are moving you uh I think we've heard this from the finance um uh Department's report that if somebody leaves they don't just fill the slot they rethink you know what do we actually need do we need to rethink there's a lot
of creative stuff going on and I don't say that in a pejorative sense of creative now they're hiding the bodies no no no no no no they are trying to move resources to where they think they have needs with that
much fluidity with that much movement figuring out three more positions three more FTE to cut is not I think as overwhelming as if
the Departments that we were talking about had been cemented in place for 5 years and we all knew that if we lost this person we'd lose that service this is one where maybe one more
reorg we could save a position here you know one more reclassification we could save FTE there um it's it's a lot easier when you have uh
more moving people pieces uh to make these kinds of things rather than go at this from the okay how many of us love you know pick the department how many people hate this department and let's all vote it it it becomes a much
easier assignment to say three positions you found three last night we think you can find three more you're pretty in ingenious about adapting to
change so keeping your fte's level would boy really help make the case that you're doing your best effort to stay under the 3% guideline
now that then this is going to sound bad but I can't think of a way around it um we were told this is a level funded budget these are Level funded Services if I went to any of the
organizations I've worked with over the years and said I've got three new positions I've got six new positions and that's level funded um I would be sent back to work on my spreadsheet
again so I think there isn't anything draconian or mean-spirited or you know we're out for revenge or any of that kind of stuff this is like we
think you can find three more positions in here they're there they've been added um and you may have to move some other stuff around but guess what you've already moved other stuff around pretty
pretty effectively over the last couple of years and I don't see things falling off a cliff and if we go from 2205 FTE back to 222
FTE that sounds like roundoff error but it turns out those three FTE are the difference between hitting at 3.81% and getting a lot closer to three so that was number one number two the capital budget
the capital budget is broken out separately and last night they made a couple of cuts they made four so you know that's there was a extensive discussion about what else would we cut if we cut next and basically at 11:30 at night
nobody wanted to dig deeper into what the fifth cut might look like and I totally understand that but I went through this report and one of the things that I came
up with was a list of 24 new programs or projects that different departments were putting together and they were highlighting them because they're proud of them and by the way it shows a lot of
creativity and Ingenuity and Innovation and you know initiative all of the things that we'd want to basically have any Town employee be proud of you know I did something new this year and instead of 24 of them they've
cut four out okay so we're still going to have 20 new initiatives I think it wouldn't Crush employee morale to find one or two or three more
projects that aren't on the to-do list for the coming year so part of me says okay nobody anticipated that the healthc care thing was going to shoot up higher than we expected I know we got surprised last year by
that and yeah they have come towards our position and that's to be congratulate I didn't thank them for that but I don't think we are being um
unreasonable to say you can get closer to the 3% and not put the town in Jeopardy so if I'm hearing you right uh you're you're you're also happy they're on the right Glide path but they're not there
in your eyes quite yet at this point I'd like to talk i' like to put uh Mr noon on the spot actually for a second and uh talk about sort of the three largest buckets in the budget and how
any one of them can be if any one of them can be cut and or trimmed or right siiz or whatever terminology you want to use when you were paying attention to the fact that we have to worry about years to come and making sure that the we're bending The Arc in the right
direction well thank thank you Mr chairman um I should have given you a heads up um so my first blush of the the budget was that 97% of the variance was accounted by three items and those were salaries um middle sex pension and
healthc Care um of the three uh we really only have uh control over one of those salaries uh which evidently uh that is the one that um the board selectman and
and town manager have chosen to to work on unfortunately we also had an increase in health insurance that was unanticipated um helped me out with my math here I think I wrote down there was $290,000
in savings and 160 going the other way yeah in health insurance which if I'm doing this math right in my head it's Nets out to 130 which uh also Nets out to what the deficit uh for the fiscal year was
showing on the ALG plan so in effect we are balanced um going forward well first I'll say so I can live with it if it's
balanced um I can live with this year going forward my um calculus is the same next year we will have probably 97 95% of a budget increase uh on the same three
items um and we won't have any more control over middle sex pension nor over health insurance um which leads me to the um the only thing we're the only lever we're going to have for the next few
years on uh is um salaries and and deployment of people if you will and if we um if we need to hold to um 3% and I think we do uh simply because
um not only um will those things be increasing and historically they've increased more than 3% over the years we'll also be adding some um general fund debt from the
forecast years in the capital plan um to the numbers that are here so um my view is I can live with it this year as it stands but somebody has to come up with a way to redeploy headcount um and if we
need fire fighters then that position has to be cut somewhere else so we have to basically hold with our headcount going forward until we can see that we can um keep a balanced
budget uh in the future years as well okay um I did neglect to uh report that uh one of the asks at ALG was if we wanted to come back with specific line items or whatnot on on to cut and um I
did send out a email to the entire committee asking for your feedback on that but I am also very hesitant to try try and do that because what ends up happening there is if you pick a line item then it becomes very easy to defend
or is very easy to have people show up in advocacy of a specific line item whereas pointing out the realization of we have a law that we have to comply with and the only way to to and I won't
say violate because it's not right but the only way to get around the way to to avoid the consequences or the expectations of that law is through an override um I would refer back to just
how close last year was so um I think they can get a little Clos to 3% um as for the statement that it's been transferred to the finance committee that's fine um they can transfer another one later um we just have to the the the
they have to transfer a budget in a certain amount of time we have to hold a budget hearing that is also state law so we're going to be having a hearing which in years past has taken less than three minutes the chair reads two paragraphs
asks if anybody has questions and the hearing is over so we can uh we can definitely make sure to make the hearing requirements so I don't think it's uh it's not set in stone that since they've sent us this one budget that we're done
with this I we can negotiate right up to to uh town meeting um Rand did Jo so looking over the FTE I did notice that sustainability office has two
people and I'm wondering why because before it only had one and that was added with I might be wrong on this with arpa funds but I'm not sure on that but I know we need one to get certain grants
and things like that but do we need two people in that office or can that be one of them where that additional person can be deployed somewhere else even if it's half you know like maybe they' be half in the sustainability office and half in something else if
they're working on grants or whatever so that's kind of what I that jumps out at me right there um that's all I had to comment right now so are you are you comfortable 3.81 or do you think they've got another uh
headcount or two to go head count of two to go okay I mean we did say in our point of view in September 3% right they and I give them you know Applause
for going from 4.56 to 3.81 but they need to get closer to the three I mean it's it's it just becomes on the budgetary in t it P us right down to taxes right again going back to the the land the homeowner we
don't have a lot of businesses in town we need more obviously um I did go to Crossroads on Friday night I was happy that it was really crowded for once I haven't seen that in a while there um which is good they said they were really busy which is great you
know but at one point they had 40 people working for them they're 18 you know their business changed they had to adjust right same thing in the town and we can't keep going back to the well over and over and over again
eventually people going to say hey I can't afford it I'm going to move out so I mean I think and then you then it house sells and then family come and a family comes in and they have two two or three kids in the schools and you know instead of somebody that's maybe retired or what have you still staying in the
town because they can afford it thank you Christie ideally we would just let the town run itself heal I mean in the sense of the Town knows
operations and they could just come and say we need this amount of money um but part of our job is to look at the ways in which they're spending the money how that affects long term and the fact is if they spend the money on Personnel
that hits us in a much larger percentage than if they do projects so I said last time I'm okay with it I I was okay with the number before it was 3.81% I would love to see that current number with the flip around to no FTE
growth therefore not having the promise of more growth next year and do it on capital projects and the other things that need to happen I think that's better long-term fiscal planning very
well D and I also uh support further cut on the head counts the ft and the reasons are two uh number one this is U the year after the override that barely pass um that's pass by a small margin so it's
not a gross year and uh the population is not growing and uh we're not looking for um increased services so it's reasonable to keep the same FTE number two is that I have mentioned this before and I want to um emphasize that is that
the two of the three items that Steve mentioned the he insurance and pension costs they are going to keep going up they are not going slowing down health insurance is time with inflation and it looks like the inflation is not slowing down anytime soon or soon as ways back
the pension cost is also going to go up because the MTO pension system is underwater and it's also tied to the stock market um and now the stock market is doing well but once there's anything slowing down in the stock market the pension cost will also go up this year
the health insurance um went up by 9. 88% and the pension costs go up by 7.11% um and this is projectable meaning that you know that next year will go more or less at the same rate um it's
gets it's getting more expensive to higher um government employees because of this because these two items are tied to the payroll and to the calculation is about 50% of the payroll adding FTE will also add to this uh will add this Fring
benefits is will get more expensive in the future so uh my support of cutting more FTS keep the FTS stable thank you any other comments on this one I'll go El say so you
Scot uh generally I um agree with a couple of the finance committee members here on the uh the go forward expense that Steve and Christy spoke of uh I listened to
the the select board meeting last last night and the impression I had was that there was a lot of support for the town budget to be greater than 3% um and going forward uh it just because as as Jason
you have mentioned before it becomes a math problem is that if one part of the budget is constantly at four or 5% and the other part of the budget is within you know the the guidelines at some point you have to have an override and I I think everybody agrees that an
override would not be passed which means that there would have to be Cuts so where would those cuts come from and um I I don't you know I don't know where they would come from but they would be uh they would have to come from
someplace and so the existing budget which is now at 3.8% 81% um I think that the actual results for the year will be a little better
than that because I don't believe the um the hiring is going to be as efficient as planned and I think there'll be some additional savings in compensation that will bring that number
down a little bit but I do feel strongly that going forward that there needs to be um in that 3% um or the three three and a half percent that we that we've always suggested
needs to be in in line going forward and but I think that there needs to be a plan well my last thought is that there there needs to be a plan with the understanding that the operation of the Town um needs to find a way to either
Outsource some work um assuming that all these Services have to be provided forever and we're not going to cut services there needs to be a way to either find find a a cheaper way to provide the same Services because at some point we're going to be faced with a situation where
um we're going to have to eliminate staff and whatever staff we're eliminating is not it's going to cost us a service and I think planning for uh thinking through that now will prevent um A disruption in Services going
forward if it's brief because that's that's a very good segue into the next section but so if it's brief go ahead all I wanted to add was uh at a different part of last night's uh select board meeting um they met with the um folks from the
food pantry and one of the things that happened in real time is I do think they're listening to us I do think they are uh becoming more mindful because once upon a time they might have told the food pentry thank you very much you
know go do what you're going to do last night they basically adopted a policy that said we're going to need to charge you a minimum I think they capped it at I forget was it 4,000 or something yeah yeah that wasn't unanimous though that
was just a couple people I I hear you but we'll we'll take progress where it shows itself if I me Mr chair I just wanted to say I think we all agree on the problem we have a compensation model that outpaces our Revenue model um when I say I'm happy with this
year one after a long time on this committee seeing anything in balance in February is is a victory um I'd rather they spend the time taking a longer view of their
headcount deployment um for fiscal 27 and Beyond then spend a whole lot more time trying to trim more three more heads out of this year's budget that's my only point I think we all agree that uh we can't afford the compensation model we have
and the only way to keep it in line with the revenue model we have is fewer people so that is a very good segue into the to the next uh main topic item the next agenda item which is a policy about
overrides and this is an initial conversation on this topic uh this did come directly out of ALG where the moderator basically said to us unless you really think you can stay within 3% per year every year forever
and ever with inflation uh north of 3% for more years than not then you probably should start having a conversation about when as a as a committee we might be open to the topic of an override
when I was thinking about this um you know the one thing I definitely do not want to do is I definitely do not want to say well every three years or every five years over X number of dates because that's you know it's impossible to to you foresee what the what the
conditions on the ground are going to be uh it also means that uh if you get your timing wrong with your with your uh uh Union negotiations uh you've got no opportunity to protect yourself when it comes time to to
negotiations so um I guess I wanted to start by saying I don't feel that prop two and a half is uh a perfect Beacon of exactly how to live how to live our lives um prop two and a
half even if we're even if we have uh New Growth every year and can can come up with 3% 3% is quite limiting this is this is the problem that we've all been saying um that said I don't want
to I don't want to suggest that we're just going to say well whenever we need to take the pressure off we'll just make sure that we get behind and override because I don't think that's really how things are going to work uh and I don't expect us to solve this tonight this is
a as I wrote on the agenda this is an initial conversation um so I I definitely want everyone's input on this um did we want to do something like try and try and tie it close more closely to
inflation where we where we say if you've if inflation over the last 5 years has been at 20% and over five years we've only been at 15% because of or 16% 17% uh compounded then maybe it's time for a
true up um that's one possibility um of course we find ourselves in a situation where we're already our our government has already outpaced inflation significantly over
the last seven years as proven as shown in our point of view so I see two people with their hand raised I'll go with Scott first and by the way that was not meant to be I'm setting a policy now this is meant to be me to be saying I'm throwing
out an idea I'm looking for input I suspect we're going to have to discuss this for multiple meetings before we can give guidance to the select board in the town and the school district uh it's not a bad concept to tie to
inflation um but I think like I think most people would think that if you gave your town more money to spend they would just spend it um I think maybe a better metric would be to tie to the average
Municipal um or teachers union um increases so the majority of our compensation is I mean the majority of our expense is salary and a lot of those are negotiated through contracts and those contracts are very public and
they're easily accessed and if you took the average of the contracts that were renewed and used that as the growth indicator it would at least cover the cost of compensation that we're going to be tied
to in contracts and then it would give the other areas of town and a little bit probably a little bit more wiggle room than they would underneath prop two and a half but not so much that they can you
know spend wildly but it so that's my thought um thanks um what are do we what are the best practices for this what are the benchmarks from other towns I mean I don't have answers but I have questions
right and what are the what are the subjective factors versus the objective factors that weigh into this sort of thing right you know we we had a barely past override last year not barely passed but you know thin margin uh so
what is the what is the appetite what is the overall outlook for you know the various Municipal economies etc etc so there's there's I mean I can if we started to whiteboard it which we're kind of doing a little bit right now I
could just ask 50 questions right off the top of things that would that would factor into a you know what our appetite would be 3 years from now however something can happen
tomorrow and we know how fast things are changing nowadays that could cause us to completely 180 what we just talked about tonight so you know I just wanted to kind of put a couple things out there into The Ether for us to think about as
we go through this conversation so I would think um inside out from what Scotch just said I wouldn't want to set our increases to the teachers contracts increases I'd want the teachers contracts to be setting their increases to what the town
can absorb um i' I'm a broken record but they've had declining enrollment for 171 18 years and yet their budgets go up and up and up they're like you showed the graph where you know the taxes have far outpaced the rate of inflation over the last 10 years and so if we were to say
you know try to Peg it to inflation in those in years where we had very very low the budget still went up at least 3% so they they they're never going to come down and say like oh G inflation is one year we'll just have a 1% race they'll never do that they're always going to try to get the most they can out of
their contracts and as far like the contracts they're only transparent after they're signed nobody knows what happens nobody knows how the sausage is made maybe some people do but I don't because it's a closed it's a closed negotiation um
so so I said while the you know you show the taxes going up like 50% where inflation's been cumulative 30% per pupil spending has been gone up 65% they cannot keep they can't just say we're going to raise go up 3% a year
whatever 4% a year if that's the teachers raises when they have fewer and fewer students every year they they have to they I guess they've talked about this that they're going to try to look at how they're going to do business differently but they have to do business differently like you talk about unsustainable practices this in the
schools you know like we talk so much about the town here but the schools are 65% of our budget um absolutely not overrides are vital and they need to be a part of a discussion that should not be an expectation that it's okay
down the line we're going to take this other bump up it is the one chance that we as citizens have to stand up and actually talk and about what spending we're doing what we're spending it on and actually have a time of reflection that did not happen with the most recent
override because we got just blindsided by the causes so at this point in time I have zero interest in agreeing to anything approximating a schedule or anything that would be regarded as a way
to predict when an override will happen cuz I don't think we need it yet and I think it's going to bypass all of the potential exercises to make sure that the government is growing in a way that is reflective of the current taxpayers
not the taxpayers who built the programs 10 15 20 years ago so one of the things that uh we definitely discussed last year when I say we I mean we discussed last year was the that it hadn't been
forecast that in the years past there had always been the at annual town meeting there were they would say not for the fiscal year that we just voted in but for the following fiscal year be forewarned we suspect we might need we have a we have
an inkling that we're going to need an override and that was absolutely vacant last year because of the crisis of health insurance and how it caught us completely off guard do you would you as part of this policy would you like to go
back to saying absolutely no way in heck do you get to do get to declare in October that we have that we need to have an override that it should be should be seen from farther out and properly planned I agree so you do these these
should be planned events but not triggered planned these should be we can tell year out and we've said for years we see one coming right growth is outstripping uh uh re cost growth is outstripping revenue growth um but I
don't think that's something that can be taken for granted that that needs to be strictly negotiated and we've had way too many way way way too many discussions where we have been told you had years to raise this issue we started
working on this project forever ago why are you bringing up the problem now towards the end and so I don't want any room for any possible misunderstanding if we say yeah we think maybe when this number gets hit or this inflation rate is hit that we would maybe support an
override I don't want that being taken as any potential I think we need to be super clear upfront override is on a caseby Case basis and it needs to be brought up early enough and and that's for everyone's benefit that it be brought up early enough but yeah
October's too late except for in the case of an emergency well when there was a policy I I don't believe it was ever written down um it was no more frequently than every 3 years um and part of that logic was
there's such a thing as override fatigue um and since last year we hadn't had one in forever there weren't any symptoms of that but uh in the past when you went
every few years uh eventually there's a fatigue fact factor and and they just don't pass um as I look at this ALG plan um I'd say yeah we can get through 27 28's begin to look
dicey and that would be three years from 25 um because there is a cumulative effect of if your compensation is going up four or 5% a year and your revenue is going up um 3% a year then you're losing 2%
which 100 million um dollar budget pretty soon you're talking real money um and the theory was you go every 3 years and um you if
needed um and you try to buy as much as another three years in the override to carry you through the next three-year period um in those days we weren't doing much in terms of
um dead Solutions that's what I was about to I was about to jump in and and say I know that the language language purists are going to kill me for this but would you count a Deb exclusion as equivalent to an override for the most part Paul I'm talking about was an
operating overrides because we weren't even thinking about that exclusion so this is how we got to have so many old buildings um that we've been replacing one after another uh um so um yeah
we I think from the time we did the public safety building and the Parker Damian building we didn't build another building in this town for 15 20 years um during which time we didn't have many
overheads um so um we can say we're not going to have a schedule uh but unless we do something to correct the imbalance between our compensation model and our Revenue model I can tell you we're probably going to have one
every three years because that's just the way the math works that's thoroughly depressing um G so um several things I want to mention
number one I think fiscal constraints a good thing it's difficult to have a consensus on some overall fiscal constraints to stop the government from keep growing prop to have is one of them so we don't want to create a mechanism to bypass that number two is that if you
tie this um um our support to the override with uh to the inflation or the Union contract then you create a mechanism that you kind of when certain things happen when there's High inflation of the high compensation grows then the taxpayers are bearing the risk
and you don't want to do that because you want to wait until that happen and that risk will be negotiated will be compromised may be shared among the citizens the um I mean the taxpayers the government and the employees so you don't want to create a mechanism that that bypass that and say when the
inflation is too high then we can have override that means the taxpayers are buing the races um so um so um uh I also think that um so when we talk about operating override I think
um the better model might be of having a better um projection of the operating expenses growth uh such things such as the the um the CATE growth the French benefit growth and you will be able to
see uh whether we're heading towards an override and that you can see in the next two or three years you can probably have a good uh sense of where they are heading towards um override and uh with with with that I think that's a a better
um model to to make decision uh ahead of time rather than wait until that year and you say we figure that we need an override I just I think if we the idea of doing a scheduled or you know doing them on a certain frequency again I think that expectation would get built
into contracts and it would make it that much harder to do Deb exclusion when you need them like people aren't going to vote for an override every 3 years and then approve a $43 million building project too like they're as a taxpayer it's all the same to me that's why I started by saying we're not going to do it on a scheduled
basis that's what was one of the first phrases out of my mouth uh Greg then then Alex one of the things that I think all of us may want to take advantage of is the meeting that will be next door
tomorrow night at the library at 7 of the economic development committee because one of the things that we're trying to do is anticipate what the town's finances are going to look like in the
future guess what one of the things that they're trying to take a look at is what's driving employment in this area um for example uh it turns out uh a significant percentage of Acton's
population Works in health care and so surprise surprise all the cuts in uh the National Institutes for health don't just Ripple through universities they also Ripple through um
employment in this town and the whole notion on can I afford to live in Acton may actually get started with where am we going to find a job so um I don't know the answer to
that because uh interestingly enough um we didn't have a quorum at our economic development committee meeting last week and so we didn't get a preview of what's coming tomorrow night I have no clue what it is but I'm going to go there because that's the kind of data that I
think will help inform decisions on you want to look out 5 years man there's a lot of things you need to know um and one of where the place where they intersect with us yeah yeah they're
a separate committee blah blah where they intersect with us is their mission is to say okay about 10% of the town's taxes are now paid by commercial 90% by residential how can we get the 10% to
11% or 12% because that then gets to the revenue side and and right now we think we can't do anything about Revenue it just we either find out what the state gives us serve we hope they don't take
it back it would be nice if we understood what the Strategic plan is for how we going to get the kind of businesses into this community that will pay taxes that that will help
fund the services to make Acton worth living in I'm glad you went first Greg thanks um do we have access to any uh fpna any sorry Financial Planning and Analysis models I mean that's this conversation
really boils down to what I've been doing during my day job for the last 50 hours basically non stop I've been building out 10-year Financial models for um setting up manufacturing plants and stuff like that
and based upon sales for you know estimated sales forecasts uh in demand volume and it changes at the whim of of you know the stock market or what we think a supplier can do for us and if we
want to I this I I I can't think of a better way if we want to get smarter about making the decision about an upcoming override having all the ammunition in the uh
requirements um a framework of policy Steve you're saying but having actual Financial models that look out five years that look out 10 years and if this Economic Development Committee can do that for us or if we can get something from the town manager I mean you know
can we extrapolate this out five years and take a look at it because then we can see really quickly you know top uh exact summary level of what the the finances will look like actual versus forecast for you know in targets for
five years then we can say all right year four fiscal year 28 there's going to be an override necessary for three and a half million let's let's get all of our ducks in a row figure out all the other a factor subjective and objective and go from there but you know all of
that the question is do we have Financial models that we can look at from a forecasting standpoint that go out five plus years not yeah okay how do we do how do we do do
we do that ourselves do we you just volunteer would you like to serve on the economic development committee oh yeah okay um I wish I had more time um I'd like to discuss more of it because I mean that's something that I'm
definitely glad to help with because it's something that we need right in order we have to be transparent about um how we're working with you know and the recommendations that we're making for the town and where's the money going to come
from um so about 10 years ago we had something like that we built it ourselves uh it was pretty pretty glui a bunch of inlink Excel spreadsheets but it was a basically an assumption
driven um model so probably de dealt with about 50 line items you know um what's your assumption about teachers's contract what's your
assumption about other contracts what what's Healthcare going to do uh um and um the difficult thing was throwing in the the capital pieces CU we had no real insight uh as to what they might be or
when they might be it was about a 10year model but um the advantage of is you could have you know one XEL spe sheet full of um one one case and then you could go okay what if I change my
assumptions and produ it a different looking one um pretty much fell into disuse because I think I was the only member that still remembered how to run it um and it was a 10-year model and
frankly nobody ever liked to see the results do you still have that kicking around somewhere somewhere I don't know whether I still have it or not I mean there you know there's two factors necessarily recommend a methodology oh sure well
there's two factors to any model right it's it's one is it is it you know it's garbage in garbage out and two are you maintaining it and are you is it sustainable are you looking at it all the time because information
changes you know every two weeks or every month you know it's an ongoing process couldn't couldn't we beef up the ALG work book so that you have a tab for the capital you have a tab for the schools and they feed into this top sheet so that these numbers here aren't
just hardcoded then you could right you have the I mean like like the contracts you know like the schools are in a $2 million hole because of the contracts it's like how do they they must see that coming because it's in a contract it's like why why isn't why
isn't that in a spreadsheet somewhere I I would I think it' be I would love to see this the ALG spreadsheet beefed up and have it be like single source of Truth as as true as we can as we can make it and understanding that out years are get less um are less precise but at
least you can see problems coming we can see a problem coming in this one already it's got a four $4.4 million shortfall in fy3 so I mean I I would love to see something like that and I'm a modeler too so i' I'd help with it I love doing that
stuff so the LG spreadsheet did recently just get paired down it was it was it it was a larger document less than two years less than two years ago uh and it had more tabs that fed into the top
line but that was deemed to be not by not by the finance committee but that was deemed to be too complicated and and not what not what they wanted to move forward with so I guarantee we can dig up one of the
older uh uh ALG spreadsheets I'm sure I've got 10 of them on my laptop um but that did get changed within the last two years last year go ahead yeah I I agree with you on
that awesome um I and I'm going to sound pedantic but that's how I'm coming across the um I have financial model that's at three different levels one it's the detail for the wonks that want to get into it uh that is you know a thousand
rows long and a thousand columns wide and then I have the managerial level that is a you know 50% distillation of that and then on the top level I have your you know your your
cxo uh summary and that's how you know so if I need to gives like here's your top level overview you can look at it in one second we can get to that sort of thing relatively easily with a with a 5year 10-year forecast we can even do something like that for an
ALG um workbook I'm happy to help with some Excel jockeying if necessary great um I would also I would like to since I'm not I do not have a reputation for being quick with the compliments when I see an opportunity to give one I want to
give it um part of the problem 10 years ago is we did not have a 10-year plan out of either the school or the town both the school district and the town have come with 10-year plans and so I would like to make sure to acknowledge
that this is a level of detail that we did not have that many years ago so at least we're going in the right direction now to uh to your point Mr lens it's how well do we use that data to
best understand the challenges facing the town and yeah we got we'll we'll definitely take advantage of your uh volunteering hours and that's not meant to be a threat of thank you for saying something but this is what this is why we're a
committee of 11 oh yeah that's why you know I I as my calendar clears up for more involvement on this committee I want to be able to you know it's why I joined so want to be able to to help out and again this is the first uh first
round conversation did you have more to say gang I thought you were leaning leaning in right so um um in my day job I also take a look at these models and my experience is that the more detailed data you got the
better the result will be because uh government forecasting Finance government uh Finance Financial forecasting is that each um Li item like pensions uh Health carees cost and also have the different model than uh Revenue
models um so um I think what I'm saying maybe um that might be some idea to like the government uh when they are doing the budget um they don't just um put a up the budget for this year but
also a few years out and that um Support also happen not just at the overall level because and then you can see the ALG budget just overall cting budget increase by 3.75% every year that that's
that's not helpful information what we have for is at the department level a detail level and then each lie item uh pension will probably go up by 7% healthare probably will her insurance will probably go up by 9% uh that would
be more helpful than having a overall uh number and then exate that's not possible to do that because the nature of different um is and revenues at different chrisy
um I think that's a really dangerous road to go down in that it's the town's job to run the town and with a bottom line budget there's a lot for us to understand about the growth of the buckets but getting down to line item
numbers is with our current Town manager going to step on a whole bunch of toes first of all so I think it's going to be very hard to get agreement to any sort of prediction at that level and and um buy in that we would need but I think it's also it makes it very easy for us
to get stuck in the Weeds on it as opposed to okay we know salaries will grow this much I think it's the uh what's the 16 liner Steve whatever 26 which is actually 34 okay um understand the growth at that level of
detail yes I understand that let me clarify it's not like we doing like the budget for two years a half three years it's not like that it's still year annual budget still annual budget it's more like looking at the oute deficit and looking at the oute um budgetary
gaps uh which is the analysis that that that you are suggesting um not not doing a budget two years ahead the original um model we had was built on you know for the town the 26 liner and for the schools um an
abbreviated version of their SU by character code which is probably about 50 lines um and I will point out Mr chairman that the original um model was built by subcommittee if you're so
inclined to nominate one we we're not going to create a standing subcommittee tonight there's enough there's enough meeting minutes and agendas so we can worry about that at at another meeting we can we we'll do it all on bank for a little while longer
here please one other thing I um I don't have the financial background that a couple of you seem to have so um I will tip my cap um at at what you know that I
don't um what I model is really squishy stuff like marketing and one of the things that we've learned over 20 years is that if you can tie the
kpis of what it was you were trying to do with the this week's anomaly that just suddenly popped up you're in a much better position to make the midc course correction you need to
make you know to accomplish whatever it was that you were trying to accomplish even if it was something squishy like building a brand My Hope and I don't know if this is doable is that we not only will have a
model that says here's what we're trending over the next five years but when Finance comes in and says okay here's the latest quarter you know we've identified ahead of time
excuse me it did what and that then will let us know when you know I think we all understood the Black Swan moment of the health care costs last last a year ago actually was longer
than a year ago wasn't it 18 months ago oh God whatever it was I was living in do yeah um and we don't know what the next one may be but it would be nice to have built in um and I'll just give you the
scenario that I'm watching right now um I did not realize that Emerson Hospital had cut back its Ambulance Service that's having an impact on ambulance demand for the town of
Acton because somebody who used to provide some of those Services isn't doing that anymore and whether it's a Medicaid reimbursement issue or whatever blah blah blah it bites us and it would have been nice to sort
of see that one coming before it bit us and so that we could who knows you know but right now one of the problem areas we're we're dealing with is is do we have enough people to man The
ambulances that suddenly seem to be in demand more than they used to be also I would just ask to uh Mr jabo's comment is that before we move on to the next subject is going back to the um the
budget review in FTE is that one of the FTE the fire prevention officer um plans to be funded by the building revolving account and then eventually over to the new uh fire revolving account and so um I think Jason you had mentioned the list
of positions and Greg you as well of positions that are funded um off the op uh offline from operating and so a fire prevention officer creates revenue and so it is one
of those new ftes but it's going to create more Revenue to the the bottom line so if you can consider that in your discussion thank you okay well this was meant to be an
initial conversation uh I did take down some notes well we'll bring it up every uh every every so often when we have an otherwise light night and uh and I also think this is the type of thing that we should definitely be discussing heavily during the summer time perhaps before we
get into our point of view for the year um but doesn't mean I won't bring it up again in the near future with that we're going to move on to the next uh agenda agenda item which is the DPW conversation uh and selectman Martin has
a presentation that he would like to give to us and then uh Greg is going to follow up with his comments from the last DPW building meeting building committee meeting which was last week welcome Mr
Martin uh good evening could somebody press the button so I can see the share key M if you um um it says that this step is needed for security I don't know what that means I
I've done this before I just put in the share key you I thought you needed to join the meeting oh do do you have a meeting running yes I will join that thank you and Greg is your uh Network stable
because I've found I've had to use my uh hard wire in the past but if you're Network stable that's good do you want to join the meeting too sure while it's up here on the screen can you make me yep panelist thank
you you should be prompted now yes thank you almost there 869 we'll get get it back to you in a minute okay good evening um and thank you for allowing me to come here uh um La last time you guys were
discussing um um the space for the building and so um I will I put together this uh presentation to outline the space uses in the building just so you uh you guys would would know also um uh
I'm not sure how many people attended or watched the DPW building committee last week um about um 8% of the space was cut at during that meeting and I will
outline those uh pieces as well most of the pictures I'm showing you are before the cuts but you'll see in the pictures where the cuts are so th this is the overall layout of the building I'm going to be blowing
these up piece by piece um the the garages in the in the back the mechanics bays are in the uh lower left and the the offices are on the lower right and then in between there's some a couple of
workshops so um the the design that we were talking about in the building committee before last week was uh 47,000 Square ft um it was the design was reduced to 43,000 square ft um uh at
that at that meeting um it supports most of the DPW employees um except for the transfer station and Cemetary um employees uh Weston and Samson uh produced this uh design during a a
process of interviewing uh people in the DPW finding out there how they worked what they did and that kind of thing and came up with a design to meet um uh the how the building would be used sorry wrong
way so first um the garage um I'm going to I most of these things I can't fit these huge pictures along with some text so I'm going to show you a picture and then show you some text um uh this um garage will stores uh is big enough to
store most of our equipment but not all of the equipment um the the smaller pieces of equipment that are uh for the most part not vehicles are in the corners um things like mowers and trailers and things like
that so the um um the the the garage is the largest piece of the building it's more than half half the building it's the lowest cost per per square foot it uh has the capacity to store 49 of our 56 vehicles
and large pieces of equipment um basically the rolling pieces of equipment um um in the most recent um reductions that happened uh at the last building committee meeting the width of the aisle was reded reduced by 4 1/2 ft
um that makes it a little dicey to to to pull in some vehicles with large turning radiuses but it's it's workable also in the garage the garage has a you know it's called a me mezanine so you might think of it as being a balcony
that that overlooks the over looks the garage and that kind of that upper part is used for storage that it was also reduced um as part of the uh recent reductions so the um the the um the fleet storage is you know uh the the numbers you're
going to see in the in the um upper uh right of these slides uh they're the first of all the the gross square footage that includes the width of the walls and everything and that the net square footage is the interior interior space that 23,89322
less than that the mechanic spaces are you know in the lower left of that original uh layout uh diagram they include um Bays mostly the biggest part by far is the base where they can pull in equipment to
repair um on the left part of this uh diagram there is the wash bay um that's been uh reduced out of the um current Des design um uh it's um you know we
would hope to add that back but right now for the the purposes of this discussion it's it's not in it's not in the design on the um right side of this design there's the places that they store parts and that kind of thing and a
in the uh lower right here um that's a some desks where they fill out paperwork on the repairs and um you know uh you know what they did to each thing as they fix it and then um order parts and things like that so that that's a
little shared space uh for the mechanics to to do desk work stop me please at any time if you have questions um so I basically said all that that space the the um in the bullets on this the um the maintenance
bays are um uh 550 55 60 ft that maintenance base does not include the wash bay which was reduced out of that so the wash bay was about 1,900 ft that's now gone but that's not included in the 5560 Square
fet um the support for cruise is in the um middle of the uh of that original diagram that I I showed you um it consists of two main pieces uh on the left here are two workshops uh one for the highway crew one for the grounds
crew where they can do interior work they do things like um uh create signs that that go on our roads or um repair chainsaws um things like that um on the leftand uh side of this uh sorry the
right hand side of this diagram are the pieces of the space that support the crews including the the locker rooms um um a a space where they um uh can get training and where they can um
uh go to in very long especially snow plowing shifts that's that multi multi-purpose room um and then there there are two offices here for the uh uh assistant uh uh operation superintendent and the tree Warden
so I'll just leave this up here for you guys for a second you can see the um uh square square footage quick quick question is the multi-purpose room the same is that also double as the break room as well uh yes good um I will say
here one of the suggestions that was talked about at two building committee meetings ago and was actually a suggestion from select board me member um Alysa nickel is that um that Corridor along the back is now gone
so um um this is a kind of an Innovative change to get from the office area to the mechanics area you have to go through the garage which is not a a a a big deal but it saves that um that
yellow space at the at the top um so the um the workshops in the revised design will actually be pushed up in this diagram against that the garage wall um and so they'll be indented into the building a little bit more than they are
now um in the in the office in administration um um I think we have um seven uh uh office workers um uh this is pretty normal office stuff you know uh file
storage the town has lots of archive plans and things that it it has to keep um uh offices for uh for folks um uh conference room um that that kind of thing that yellow area is the amount of
space uh reduced in the current design which forces uh a relayout of the space B and that relayout is in progress I have a sneak peek a couple slides forward so you can see where that's going but the the the relayout is not cast in concrete or wallboard or
anything else um so this area supports um the the people um that are listed in the lower left of of this slide or the the rle that are listed um I just want to
emphasize you know that the reason why um the select board has been um talked a lot about you know that it's very difficult to remove these folks from the building and put them elsewhere is that they interact with everybody so
I'll just go through and and and let you know that so the um the operation superintendent really has to remain at this building and needs a space at this building right that um all his direct reports are in this building the DPW
director could be offsite but again the vast majority of his employees are in this building um there's a business manager and an office manager um those two people um uh do everything from um
managing the financials of the department including um ordering things when Crews need stuff um um to uh helping to manage the um the job and time planning for um the the crews so uh
and and many other things and dealing with the public as well both of those people deal with the public that come to the DPW for some reason or another inv vendors that kind of thing um it would be very difficult to have those people off site since they do interact with the
cruise is it absolutely impossible um no but um uh it would be it would be difficult and then there are three people that work in the engineering department um uh the uh Town engineer herself and um another engineer um and
uh we have an intern as well so um um there's just seven people um you know I think it depends you know you could it's a little bit subjective as to which of those people you could decide to be to
be moved moved off it's a little little little difficult to decide who the the engineering staff also deals with the crews and the crews don't have you know they're not in front of computers right they're out except in the morning and the evening
and so they can't really get on a zoom with a town engineer because they they'd have to maybe go home and use their home computers or something um the and so the the town engineer would be for to come to this meeting to review plans or something for the next job um you know
traveling back and forth to wherever her office um office was and in addition as I pointed out uh last time we would have to we don't have space in other buildings in town we would have to rent space which is some tens of thousands of dollars plus you know build the suit or
what or not you know so um um that uh you know that that it's a difficult uh um thing to to figure out this is the the new layout um again this is a a work in progress basically that um there was
only one desk in the space that I showed you that with the um um the yellow stripe through it that was a place for a future employee that is gone and and there was a uh a large conference room
and a small conference room the small conference room is also gone so and then everything is moved around here just because the dimensions are are such that you know where a closet fit before it doesn't fit now and we can move a closet over there and that kind of thing so the layout is is is a bit different than it
was uh two slides ago um but uh that that's um that that area again this this area is is is kind of the smallest part of the building and um it does support those those seven uh
people and that's it and I'm happy to answer any any questions I can go back and review a slide or whatever people want thank you David for the presentation uh I appreciate um everything that you went through um what I want with the original size
building that they asked without it shrinking for um a significant reduction in price I want to say it was 50% but I'd have to read the email here more carefully um
with a uh believe the town is menden Medway Medway with a data point like that uh I think it would make sense to at least explore um this this other consulting
firm um to see if there might be different savings that might make the building the original size as proposed but still save the taxpayers money so unfortunately the information in that email is not correct it's not
factually correct and I'm sorry that it was sent out um so in Medway um Weston and Samson did the feasibility study and the other firm did the design during the feasibility study there's obviously
an estimate of cost but there's not a specific cost like you know pricing for a designed building and so um this happens to us it happens to other places too there were different bids for the two things you know the feasibility
study was one firm and the design was another firm um they were not fired um that's just not correct all right so how do I so I have one select board member from another town saying something you're saying something completely how do I validate your comments I can tell
you that after that that email um the the town manager contacted Medway and found out the story and so what's in that email is not correct so um and so we could do another design right nobody is going to off the
cuff say oh I can make it $10 million cheaper or $5 million cheaper or whatever um you need another design to do that right and that those the designs are not cheap right the design to design the building again would cost over a
million dollars um and yes we could do that um uh I don't think we'd gain a lot from that I will say that the the the reductions here are still being costed
out um but we're looking at a total project cost probably under $38 million all right so let me ask different questions because it makes no sense to go back and forth on that I trust that the town manager did what you said um just a couple quot on I'm sure
other people have questions um when you talk about Staffing that have to be in the building um my initial reaction to that is uh Staffing can be in the building without having to have an office there or having physical space to to be there if they're
managing um I'm assuming they're not managing behind a desk they're managing by walking around and talking to people engaging and looking at things they can visit a site manage and not physically have to have an office there that's just my gut on that and then the second thing
is uh just like I I I didn't understand why we're storing paper why don't we just scan things and and have them electronic I saw like seven filing cabinets when I went through the walkth through why do we have filing cab why do we just make everything electronic so
that I'll stop with my questions after that that's an excellent excellent suggestion and we have plans to do that it it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to digitize all the the things that we have you know they're all various sized drawings and things like
that it you know the the scanning of something that's you know 3x4 ft or even larger is is is not obvious right so and we have um archives plans like that we have
there's so many of them that there actually some are kept at the wastewater treatment facility um but we completely agree um over time we intend to digitize all those things it does not make sense to keep the paper um so I will say that
and I I think the you know your um your your discussions about the um you know the crew supervisors um they're the ones that really um don't that would leave leave the
building there's really just two of those the operations superintendent and the assistant um operations superintendent th those um two folks also have quite a number of direct reports and so having an office to to be
able to deal with Personnel issues is important you know could those two people live in cubicles instead of offices probably you know uh but actually in this in the current rign then you need which you know if if you
design corporate spaces right you need us lots of conference rooms in this case probably one or two more to be able to do private conversations and so um we just lost a conference room in this in this redesign there's there's only one
for the office staff um and so um you know it this is I my my point here is this this is not that big a space it's very difficult um to make adjustments like those that
you're suggesting to have a big effect on the price right because it's not like we're moving you know a 100 people from offices to cubicles we'd be moving to and then we need a conference room so it's a it's it's difficult you know
could we do that yes would we save a lot of money no I have a couple questions did you say that what did you say the final you think the cost will be with this 8% smaller building um we this has not been fully costed right so it you know we we
uh just so everybody does know too for the the costing there are two independent costers that were uh uh Rec reconciled and it turns out in many cases they had the exact same numbers so that that that was um uh uh good but we
expect the number to be uh less than $38 million for project cost uh not the not the just the building cost I don't know what the building cost would be so what we were talking about um in last bu $43 million is would be in
the neighborhood of 38 or a little bit less than that okay um my other question is uh did we get multiple bids at any point you know before we did feasibility after once we had a design did we put that design out for bid so almost all the steps that we take as a town they're
all bid out so the um the design was bid out and then when we have the cost and everything done and uh assuming that town meeting approves then we would bid the Project's construction
right um and you know we usually get a small number a handful of bids on that kind of thing so uh we would probably have a few construction firms to choose from okay so that hasn't okay thank you no we we can't do that until town meeting has the money right
because we we'd be on the path to signing ourselves up to to spend the money and we haven't appropriated the money just to put a finer point on one thing that you just said this $37 million that you just quoted that again
to be clear that is the anticipated full project cost because I've I don't want there to be confusion later where you in previous meetings we've been told well there's the soft costs and there's that and we get to 43 or 47 or but you're now
saying that you're anticipating pending the official numbers that come back when they come back in another couple of weeks you're anticipating a $37 million our total project all in I think I said less than
38 but 37 something okay 376 376 okay well that's not costed yet so I don't want to get that that that's a very exact number for not a very exact um uh price so um uh um but yes the total
project cost we did have a little bit of a discussion last night as to whether you know sometimes as you move forward as you know from being on building committees um you can reduce the contingencies as things get more and more defined there's a little bit of hesitation there because of you know
tariffs and other things that we might not want to reduce the contingencies yet um but that's where we are do you want to do your presentation Now Greg and then we can sure can
so9 869 33 77 0843 record I will put yourself on mute I will promote you computer now you can share e
the good news is most of this is not redundant to what David just presented um although we are both looking at the same proposal so hopefully this is going to be um additional uh
news uh some of this will be um perspective and I have a bias I want to disclose that upfront um before I got into marketing I was a
journalist and we learned six questions to ask in every interview and it turned out that even after I got out of Journalism they are the framework I use to try to understand things that I'm trying to figure out so I am uh
applying a framework um uh to take a look this building so the first question that I um take a look at is what are we
building and um I think all of you could probably uh cite the Mantra here uh want versus needs and um that's a hard question to get at and I will just confess you know how do you know that what you really
really really really want isn't something that you might actually not need and so one of the ways that um people try to get at this is the hard way and we tried the hard
way back in November where they came in with the initial here's what you asked us to build we've designed it um it's about 46,8 184 Square ft by the way that will
cost you about 46.9 million and even the members of the DPW building committee had sticker shock so this is not a finance committee versus another board or whatever it's
like the people who've been putting their time in over the last two years to to work on this recognize that that number would not fly so on December 12th they came back with a revision
and they took our suggestion about eliminating the phased construction and they made a couple of other reductions and that's then where the old version was at the $43 million
version that we knew about until last week now last week they cut 8,000 or not 8,000 they cut 8% out of the square footage and David showed you an accurate closeup
of each of these things this is a sort of the pulling back for a second what's in yellow is what was in the $43 million version that got cut and some of the cuts came out of uh the garage uh some
of them came out of the storage Bay uh wash bay um the corridor disappeared some of the office space Etc ET and oh by the way you you don't see it in the chart but significantly um there was a reduction
in the geothermal Wells uh from about 40 to 30 and and um there was a savings and cost there now the tough thing to say is okay we've
reduced it is that what we need and again I'm not sure that there's an easy answer to this but one way to skin that cat is to say well the folks at Weston and Samson have been providing data on what other communities have done
in the last seven years and that's the time frame they used but that seems relevant because if you go too far back you know who who knows the inflation rates uh who knows whatever but it it seemed reasonable they had a
list initially of 20 communities actually 22 two of them were in New York I knocked the two in New York out I took a look at the 20 and some of them were cities like Medford and some of them were teeny tiny towns like
Rockport and I said if I had to stand up at town meeting and say this is a comparable Community I get you know questioned so I knocked the outliers off
and I said said okay if we have a community that is 20% larger than Acton or 20% smaller than Acton and they've built a new DPW building in the last seven years and oh by the way how many accepted road miles do they have because
that's what the DPW is responsible for not all the road miles in the town because we don't do route two that's not ours but you know what are we responsible for and we compare that to other communities you can come up with what is called the road mile
ratio and if you look through all of that the 8% reduction that we came in with last week is really really close to the comparable 20 communities or the comparable communities if you
consider 20% larger or 20% smaller to be comparable so you know is 2% close enough could we get closer hold that thought there's a a tighter framework that you
can also use and so this is why there is no easy answer you got to make some choices but let's say instead of looking at communities that are 20% larger 20% smaller we look at the ones that are 10% larger or 10% smaller it's a shorter
list and in this case when we compare what we're planning to do with the 8% reduction we're about 5.7% larger than that list so again this is another one of those great cases where we've made
progress we're getting closer we're still at sort of the high end of the comparable list and whether we're a little high at the high end or sort of a little bit more at the high end is sort of where we're at now that then brings us to the new cost
and again the reason why there is an asterisk on the 37 . 6 million is because it was stated publicly last night at the select board meeting I went back and I checked acting TV I think I'm quoting it accurately but there were all
kinds of caveats around it this is a back of the envelope ballpark estimate we're sending it off to a couple people who are going to look it over and come back and say yes no maybe whatever but you
know this was a public number number that was shared at a public meeting and so it's it's it's as close to a working number as we've got you know is it cast in concrete no not until we get the estimates back and that won't be for
another week or two something it's sometime in March and so okay let's work with this number 37.6 million is that in the ballpark well it's a little high if you
use the comparable method another way that you can try to figure out if we're in the right zone or not is to say okay do the costs justify the benefits and one of the observations
I'll make is that some of the benefits that are uh in the presentation material are vague as a marketing guy I know what it's like to be accused of being
vague so I spot vague when I see vague and so something like well there's going to be improved Recruitment and Retention okay I'll KN my head how much what's that worth is it worth 37.6
million well we've got a department with 34.3 FTE that means means million bucks means 3 million bucks because you're forgetting that this can be
bonded oh okay sorry it's let's put this way that's a that's a hell of a retention plan I think a gold watch might get us further but that's me or improved Public Service response time
now there is a beautiful brilliant YouTube video that shows all the vehicles pulling in and out to try to get ready to go out and plow the snow yeah yeah I know it's stop motion it's it's you know you you put a
soundtrack to it and be really funny but again the question is if we get out to plow the snow 20 minutes faster 30 minutes faster 40 minutes faster every time it snows what's the benefit there can you
do a cost benefit analysis and so one of the missing numbers David that you know as a member of the committee I'm going to try to work on because somebody's going to ask me for these numbers and I don't have them yet is we ought to have some calculations
like that we ought to be able to say well we did the math and you know having a new building is not the benefit having a new building that enables us to be be more responsive or productive
or hang on to employees or that has a calculable cost and we haven't calculated it yet now it brings this back to us yeah yeah yeah we put together a
pretty good document actually I I was surprised huh please be Clos to oh is that because I'm saying good things about the document no it's because we want oh never mind it's a really good document though the point of view that we came up with um I think holds up
pretty well and here we are talking about things that can change overnight well gosh we're we're 8 months 6 months seven months later it still looks pretty
good um we still think an override would fail I still think that we still think that debt exclusions are unaffordable at this time uh probably probably um we also wanted to smooth
things out and not have any debt exclusions until fiscal year 2029 I might budge on the 2029 time frame I think I said at our last meeting that you know maybe it's 2028 I don't know but it's you know this
spring I'm I don't know I don't I don't think so but that's me and then I went after the number that's missing and this is the number that I wish I could tell you I could predict
this in with more certainty but the people who supposed to know don't know either but they're watching this like a hawk and it turns out that these tariffs are supposed to take effect March
12th I don't know when we're going to get our estimate I hope it's not March 11th but one of the challenges that we're going to have to deal with is deal with this contingency what happens when the tariffs hit or will they hit or Will
trump pull another Oh Canada don't worry you got 30 more days I'll think about it some more it don't know boy if I could predict that I would leave the finance committee and make a strategic bet and spend time on an island but
okay but the people who are in the industry construction dive is the industry trade press and they interviewed the people out in Chicago at gordian who basically
are the people you go to to get these kind of um analysis done so they're not a construction firm they're an anal an analyst firm and I said well when these tariffs hit it's probably going to push some people to
delay construction okay why well it turns out not because we're fear-mongering not because we're Imagining the boogeyman not because we are trying to ramp stuff up but because
Trump has raised tariffs 25% on steel before he did it in 2018 and in 2018 the price for Benchmark steel
jumped 14% in the first year 10% in the second year and then we all got distracted by covid and so we stopped taking a look at what the price of steel was so what is likely to happen on March
12th don't know can't promise it for sure but if we take the data that we have which is the best that we've got and we apply it yeah when we built the public safety building there was a lot
of Steel in that that was 22 years ago so I'm not sure we can use that as a benchmark for today but it's probably going to be the keep your eyes focused cuz this is the one to watch
for so what do we do well we got the 8% reduction but I want to give David some credit here because he came to our meeting last week
and he said I heard there any other ways we can like reduce the scope of this thing kudos to you David thank you and he actually had two ideas that I thought were so good I want to share them with you although David can expound
on them one of which is there's a couple of the offices at the sort of the far right of that reconfigured office thing that he showed us maybe we don't Bill him
now maybe we come back and build them a couple years from now that's that's that's a way of getting the scope down and the other suggestion that he had that I liked a lot was okay we have different kinds of equipment some of the equipment like the
snow plows we need in the heated building in the winter to get out the pl snow but there's other summer equipment that you don't need to get in a heated building you just need to get it in a covered building and in the summer by the way
you can swap you move the snow plows into the covered building and you know and and it was sort of mentioned at our meeting last week and well if we need another card up our
slave we'll go back and take a look at it but probably not between now and town meeting Maybe it's the fallback plan if the election fails or the town
meeting fails and we need to think about this a second time so that brings us to us we've got to make some decisions guess what there's other boards and committees that have to make some decisions too we're going to all have to make decisions
with not quite being sure what the tariffs are going to do and trust me I don't have better Insight than somebody else does on that one that's just I know it's the it's the wild card in this
particular game and then we're supposed to give advice whether we recommend proon whatever to voters who are then going to have to make their best guesstimate
twice and that's the who what why where when and how of what's in front of us anybody care to comment or we just going to do this all again on Friday with the select board
sure David so uh just about the the uh the tariffs if that inflated the cost of the project so much it would just stop right because it uh town meeting would um uh appropriate an amount of money and
if we go to contract you know to go to ask for bids and we don't get anybody to bid what town meeting has appropriated you know we probably don't move forward right you or or we have to make some other kind of decision some kind of
staging decision or something I don't know but um that's not really a risk to the taxpayer in that sense right they they they appropriate what they appropriate and they're not going to be uh we can't overspend that right they
we we can't say oh the cost of Steel went up 25% and that's half the materials cost so it's 12% more than you appropriate um I mean if we did that we'd have to ask them at another town meeting um to
to go again so um it's not um an overspending risk it's a stop of the project risk yeah David um I think I've been talking about um does all the equipment have to be in a
heated um space all the time um makes a lot of sense to me that you could switch equipment storage based on season um seems to me it would reduce the cost
um um why would we hold that back as an idea um to maybe compensate for tariffs when indeed if tariffs go through I don't think we're going to have enough
money um to um get this thing built um my last job was making ball bearings and I studied steel prices quite a bit we don't as a nation make a lot of
Steel it comes from somewhere a lot of it comes from Canada actually um so I don't know why we wouldn't just advance that proposition now um perhaps lower the cost of the project and give it a better chance um
at passing um my father Works in construction ah when Co hit plywood went from $20 a sheet to 80 plus and I it makes me really curious with your data Greg how much of the how
many of those projects were post that covid huge jump and were they therefore made smaller to compensate for that so I I don't without a year next to the various projects I don't know how comparable some of those towns are even with all of
your other most most of the towns there um happened back before Co the the one that came closest that was in the covid window was Arlington and I knocked it off because it was just a 46,000 population town
that seemed not as comparable and and so the closer you get to the co Zone we also got to the anomaly zone so it dropped out yeah I would just I wouldn't
be surprised if some of those variations um that drive the overall average are from that really big jump that we had there so I I don't know how much I would well then then then let me tell you something about that methodology then because I didn't look at the
prices I looked at the square feet and what I'm saying is they might have decreased Square because of the price of because of theice which is the same thing we're looking at right now making it smaller fair enough and that also that brings in so we got this is going to sound way
more callous than I mean it to be we got super lucky that we built the the boardwalk School the time that we did because we we did it in the dead middle of Co which did have which have some
Supply some Supply constraints and things didn't arrive as quickly as we wanted them to I'm looking at you uh the German built um German built turbines on the top of the building that came in 6 months late um but the cost for that project went down
because we were in a recession because there was people were dying for work so that helped us and the other thing that helped us is the interest rates collapsed unfortunately with tariffs the interest rates are not going to collapse
they're going to go the other direction uh the only way that interest rates are going to go down is if we're in a really bad recession uh which again we're 30 days into the Trump presidency let's see uh let's see what we let's see what happens
in the next couple of months uh none of us can none of us can crystal ball this um but if you're looking at the wh ifs of what could have happened with with the during the times of Co remember we probably
there's no way we' have been able to build the boardwalk campus for 2153 30-year Blended borrowing rates which is which we'd love to be
able to get for another large project so so just adding that in as another variable we have to pay attention to yeah go ahead I'd also like to point out that in our um point of view the 2029 year where
we recommend um not having an override before then is I believe in large Port based on an error in the ALG model which said that that was the year when the debt from the Junior and Senior High renovation dropped off but it in fact
has dropped off now so that was sort of based on the misinformation that a hand raised I think so it's your um is there a decision that we want to make tonight uh based upon this or is
it a Contin Just A continuing conversation based upon the from a couple weeks ago uh I'm not looking for a final position tonight for the simple reason of I would like to go into Friday's meeting with the select word with as open mind as possible um that
said the time for us to make our recommendation and get it that this window is collapsing quickly and if we're if we're not going to get a hard number until the third or fourth week of March third week of March is I think we're also looking at the
12th I believe that's the case oh dripping with irony uh so but again we wouldn't know the impact on day one anyway right so um uh you know the impact of the terrorists if they go on into effect on that day agreed but we
would know if they do go into effect or if this is all smoking mirrors um but to your point the the drop dead date that we have to make up our mind to be done with us is April 15th because that's the day that the warrant goes to print right
that then goes to every house in town every address in town every everybody in town so um we got six weeks yeah uh I I don't think we need to make up our mind tonight but in the next meeting or two
we're probably going to be making up our mind I excellent thank you for that I have another too actually three things popped into my head as as I was listening to everyone um Greg with your comparisons I'm and I saw Burlington jump out there and I saw Norwood with
the you know and I'm thinking that they have uh their commercial areas versus their res residential areas are substantially higher I wonder if there's a factor that uh that weighs into the
comparables based upon percentage of commercial versus versus residential and what sort of involvement is with those dpws the answer is I haven't looked at that but we can dig into it and um the
reason I showed two list of comp comparables is I'm not even sure we've got the final list of comparables that we'd want to stand up at town meeting with yet right right but I I wanted to give you sort of ranges um but yeah there are other
filters that we could uh we could try to apply because I I I think that gets to the one of the squishiest issues which is how do we know this is right sized right what what's the bench what is the
what is the proper br benchmarking because you know Burlington was an outlier with a 66,000 foot building but I can see that because they might be offering a lot of services to you know the mall and everything else then the other two things are kind of related and they're just food for thought is that
this building is a th000 bucks a square foot right it's give or take right give or take and then what did you say it's 34 FTE and if it's bonded that's approximately like what 3 and2 million
per FTE over the course so I'd want to be a little more careful with my math it's the the current expectation is on the order of 2.3 to 2.5 million per year for 30 years right and if there
are there are 34 employees but there's only six that are you know the rest of it the rest of the people are show up shower or show up go go to work back and shower so I I that's definitely something we need to weigh in on I'm
sorry to cut you off I know you have more to say no that's that's kind of it and I mean I wanted to spur on the conversation I mean like lifetime earnings versus cost per employee well and so I got when I when I was talking to the town manager about this he got um he he made it clear that I was shouldn't
be using a 30-year number I should be using a 60 or 70-year number because that's how long the building's going to be in play and I would I would say you know maybe 30 years is too short for me to just pay attention to the cost of the bond but uh maybe 70 years is a is a bit
pie in the sky as well right so there's probably some middle ground in in in the end there part of what I wanted to make sure that we point out is I'm not even sure I you know I I I appreciate you doing all the work on the comparables uh Mr jarbo but
um I go back to what I said at the beginning of all of this which is the most expensive way to build a building is to do it from a municipal perspective uh I would love to have seen a significantly smaller building like
tiny compared to this that addresses the only glaring need that I see at the DPW building when I walk through it and the only glaring need I see are the changing rooms the locker room
configuration so I would much rather rather than just be directed from the well the uh the uh feasibility committee said we needed a new building I would much rather we take a complete step back
and say the main thing that we need to solve from an employee retention perspective is to make it so that the Ural is not right next to the locker so let's put in the smallest effective building for the six
employees who are going to be there full-time and the and the workers that come in drop off their lunch jump in the trucks and drive away I know the cinder block building is an isore I know no one likes that cinder block
building when you have to pay the absolute top dollar because you made the mistake of being a municipality and the and the laws are such that you have to pay the prevailing wage you should do everything in your power to avoid building a
gigantic building I would much rather rebuild a small building that solves the need repurpose the cindered block building because it's got easy heat for the vehicles that need to be heated in
the in the winter and they are certainly not all 59 Vehicles 47 to 59 Vehicles I'm not really sure how we use 59 vehicles but again I'm not a DPW worker so I can definitely be accused of not
understanding why we need quite that many vehicles than 23 plows 23 was the number we counted Roland it was a huge number of plows uh so while I appreciate doing this
comparison this is this is like peer pressure right why do I care what the other towns built I care about building what's right for this town and I would argue that what's right for this town is a nice small new building that addresses
the Personnel part and then we leverage these stuff that we already have and make it something that's way less expensive and therefore affordable and meets the need rather than the want I I've gone round and round with
people on this topic and you can call me a Philistine but there is no way in hell I understand I can understand why every piece of equipment that we have needs to to be in a radiant floor heat garage you're never going to convince me of
that I'm sorry you just aren't did I interrupt any of your other questions I like the radiant flooring at my house so I can see why wa somebody it's pretty awesome came with the house though but
my house is over engineered um no that was it I mean and I agree with that it's it goes back to asking the question is the wants versus the needs what is the number one thing and if that is indeed what it is you know the for the
Personnel specifically there's there's some short I wouldn't even call it a short-term fix there's there is something that can be done that will not um you know risk there's no appetite for an
override right so that's it thank you Greg I just want to defend my comparable list I put a lot of work into that and I did thank you for it oh I wasn't discounting at all I
think different fact here here here um in fact I shared this story with um one of the editors of the act and exchange this week who uh accused me correctly of uh looking beyond the
town's borders uh when I was writing stories I was writing about communities like mayard all the way out there or boxboro just really really out there and
I I went back to her with this anecdote I said there is uh a real provincialism in New England that just comes with a territory that uh showed itself in a headline in a newspaper the The Vineyard
Gazette and one week there weekly paper the headline said local flags at half mast and um the story when you finally got into it in the second or third paragraph said oh by the way Pearl Harbor was bombed last
week and the anecdote is that sometimes we like that if it doesn't happen in Acton it doesn't count and I would tell you that uh the select boards and the finance committees in
hundreds of towns across this Commonwealth are wrestling with similar issues like we are they have to make compromises like we do and guess what occasionally we can learn some lessons from them and some of them may learn
lessons from us and if we can come up with a better solution boy I can tell you there's the there are folks in meard right now who are watching Acton how we are going to do with the DPW building because they need one down the road
too so yeah yeah I I'm going to stand up for my comparables just have a question um and I probably should have emailed the whole team here but uh in a prior meeting um I know we there was a I believe there was
a reference to the cost of this project as it was pres pre previously presented at I think it was $500 for the taxpayer per year then that was corrected by the town manager and I think David as well
to a $300 figure and my question is was the 500 it was the $500 calculation uh correct and was the is
the three $0000 calculation um factoring in the rollof of debt uh and then that is is the 300 a net figure and the $500 a gross figure uh what was the answer I think may I
think it was Steve that did the math was it you that did the math on 500 I remember hearing 500 it happened before I got on DPW that that was done before I got on the DPW committee so I I'm not familiar with that the C that calculation it was happened during
finance committee it was it was here yes that's why I'm mentioning it to finance committee then I was sleeping okay does any anybody remember David um The Debt Service would be about 2.6 million assuming an
interest rate of 4.25% uh which means the and the average single family house would be $337 a year and the average condo would be $197 a year so where did the 500 come
from I I think someone read something wrong and and added in other debt like for the fire station and um or something I don't know but that it's not right even if it was said I know it was correct and I just was trying to
understand the Baseline I I think someone was looking at a combined level of um deferred debt so um okay okay thank you may I also say that there
is no plan to heat the garage with radiant heat and there never was this I I just don't want that to get out there that we're going to heat the there will be the garage is minimally heated probably with an air blower with warmth
from a heat pump fed from geothermal Wells thank you for that clarification uh a reminder we'll be back here on Friday night 7 o'clock with the select board um and
uh I suspect this will be that meeting will be the last opportunity for Minds to be changed um and then uh when do you plan on having the
draft warrant um it'll be gradually between now and April 15th it was on our agenda last night we skipped it because we were running past midnight um we have it's in the packet if you want to go look at there is an article list um and we were going to begin discussing that and we
deferred it just because uh so we we'll be working on it from our next meeting through till the time it gets printed um my guess is around April 1st um I like April 1st because you can't hold me to that one um uh because it's April Fool's
Day um but know around April 1st uh we will have there'll be the text of the warrant two weeks is exceptionally short okay so we'll have to start carving up the the uh the article list
probably in our next meeting um because I believe in the past we've had greater opportunity than one or one or two meetings to to go through all the topics invite the different groups in uh because we usually invite in the CPC and
we invite in any any of the other um are there if there are if there are uh citizen petitions we we like to try and have an opportunity to weigh in on them rather than be shotgun so two weeks is a little tight
sir yes um so we we'll be on the exact same schedule as you um and so we're going to begin to probably divide up our um uh you know assignments for Warrant articles I will note also that the the mo motions are not in the warrant and so
um you know for any any article I mean we will probably have agreed on the amounts uh beforehand but there um uh as Mr noon points out every now and the alj is some cases agreed the night before in which case the number in the motion now
it comes tonight before Mr chairman you can you can bring in people to talk about things before you have the final language agreed um our custom is that we don't vote uh anything until the final
number this goes into the warrant and we don't vote until after we have a public hearing okay Christy um with the move of the election date to later I'm wondering if
that's why we're getting the warrant later in the season two um but I'm hoping you could encourage the town manager to have a draft warrant sooner than we are for the sake of due diligence yeah I I'll try to do that mostly that's up to the board and I'll
I'll try to press on that okay uh believe the next uh item is uh committee business we had one uh meeting minutes that we needed to review um I heard from Roland that under
Christy's section there was a typo where the word specific was is missing an e uh thank you that's a very Eagle eyed that's that's excellent are there any other um are there any other adjustments that need to be made
to the meeting minutes from January 31st 2025 joint fincom select board meeting motion to accept as amended second all those in favor please
say I I opposed and abstentions that is approved okay now on to Leon reports other than Greg telling us to make sure to go to EDC tomorrow night do we have any other leaz on reports report s Scott uh since our last meeting I
attended the health and insurance trust uh meeting and I will be very brief with it since it's getting late uh they're doing well uh at the end at 12:31 they had a credit balance of 137,000 um they're in U they're going
through um the runout at this point and the contract closes in June of 2025 that's just sweet to the point excellent any other leas on reports okay Mr lens oh Roland what time
is the meeting on Friday believe it's 7 P.M thank you yes Maran um may may I just ask a question um so Scott the contract that runs out in June and which contract is that do you know the one that's going to
run out in June I know I'm sorry and we can just say contract we cont detailed notes Here contract end I believe it's the um uh it's I believe it's the Gallagher
maybe or um Bugatti Harrison um I'm not sure that's all right I'll just say contract ends in June thank you okay thank you that's that's what I wrote that's all I didn't say which contract I just wrote contract
engine CH all right like a motion to adjourn second all those in favor say I I opposed extensions got