And I gota see where my agenda here is. I got so many things open. I was working away on a bunch of other stuff. Here we are. All right. So, um, well, I don't have
much to say in terms of yearly goals. I mean, you guys uh did a fabulous job last year, especially with as many warrant articles as there was, and so uh you know, you had pretty much uh the warrant was printed with all of your
recommendations and uh you did a pretty good job. So, all I can really say in terms of goals is keep up the good work. You really did uh you did very very well. Um, so I'll open uh for nominations for
chair. I'll nominate Jillian Prrenter gas for chair. I'll second that. Okay. Do I have Thank you. Okay. Do I have any other nominations? Okay. Not hearing any further nominations. I'll close the nomination
process and uh move to uh election. And so uh all those in favor of the nominees, Jillian and Friendagos uh please raise your hand. Okay. Unanimous. Raise their virtual hand.
Um okay. So uh you're now our chair Jillian. And so, um, what I'll do is turn the meeting over to you and then you can, uh, elect a vice chair and a
secretary. And, uh, congratulations. Thank you. Um, so, um, I would like to nominate a vice chair, um, as Katie.
I'll second. Do I have a second? We have a second. Do we have any further nominations or discussion? I don't think so, but that's okay. Okay. Um so, um I'll take um I think uh
since my camera doesn't work, um I'll take a roll call vote um for Katie. Um Linda, yes. Nathan, yes. Peter, yes. Male, yes.
Nathaniel. Yes. I saw you come off mute. Yes. Okay. Uh Katie. Yes. Uh and I'm also Yes. So congratulations Katie on being the vice chair. Um
so and I think the the last position we have to nominate is um the scribe. Um, so I would like to nominate Linda as Fred. I will second. All right, we have a second. Do we have
any further nominations or discussion? No. All right, so I'll take a roll call vote. Um, Nathan, yes. Peter, yes. Male, yes.
Katie, I saw you say yes, but I didn't hear it. Oh, sorry. Yes. Okay. Sorry, it might be my computer. Uh, Nathaniel, yes, Linda. Yes, I am also a yes. Um, so congratulations,
Linda. You are now our scribe. Thank you for your support. Um, great. All right. So, I think we've nominated all of our different positions. Um, I would like to briefly read the remote um script for our meetings. Uh, and then we can jump
into any other topics um, Dick, that you'd like to discuss. No, I uh I don't have any. And uh I'll probably leave the meeting because uh you're more than capable of running the the show here. And uh so uh you've done
a fabulous job and if you keep up that good work, I'm sure you well represent the town. So thank you very much for everything. Thank you so much. All right. Uh so I will read our uh remote meeting script here. So, as a preliminary matter, this is Jillian
Prenagghast. I am now the chair for this fiscal year. Um, so please permit me to confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. Um, so I won't go through roll call for all of the fincom members. Um, since we've already taken
votes and otherwise um Doug, did you want to before I start reading the full remote meeting script, did would you also like to open your meeting? How would you like to proceed there? Um, no, we don't do anything fancy. Go ahead. You can progress and we'll
we'll talk when it's our time. All right. Um, and then, um, so I see we do have some staff on here. So, Kevin, thanks for joining us tonight to talk about transfers. Much appreciated. Uh, and then I see we have a bunch of our friends from the capital planning
committee. Thank you very much for coming. Um so all right let's see so good evening this is an open meeting of the finance committee is being conducted via zoom um we will also be opening a joint meeting with the capital planning committee um
as topics number two. So uh speakers on the agenda will be participating remotely and the chair may allow for the public to provide comment. Um the committee would love to hear public comments and if there's further action that is required um we will add the matter as appropriate to a forthcoming agenda depending on the comment the
committee if they are able within the confines of open meeting law responds with information as opposed to needing to deliberate on the matter. Please note that while an option for remote attendance and our participation is being provided as a courtesy to the public, this meeting will not be suspended um or terminated if
technological problems interrupt the virtual broadcast to individual attendees unless required by law. Accordingly, please be aware that other folks may be able to see you. So, please take care not to screen share your computer. Anything that you broadcast may be captured by the recording. Um and
we'd like to also thank WAVM um for posting these recordings in the future to the YouTube channel. Um for all meeting materials, you can find them on board docs um unless we know otherwise. Um and we will now turn um to the agenda.
So I believe as our first agenda topic um we were going to talk about transfers um Kevin. So, I know that you just sent out another um updated transfer.
Um it's pretty uh at like 4 pm, which I didn't actually have a chance to send out to the rest of the committee. Um pretty minor changes. So, okay. I just did one last kind of work through
the whole general fund and look at all the expense accounts after, you know, the final payroll is posted. So, and all the expenses and took into consideration incumbrances that we have so far. So,
that's there's just some minor changes. So, overall, do you want me to share my screen or um if you're able to I think Dev might have to give you permission. He's technically the host.
Um, Jillian, what I see posted in board docs is the Maynard power thing under fiscal transfers. I don't see it here. So, the one that he's going to present is not actually posted because I'm just going to send it in an email. Um,
okay. Okay. I'll go ahead and try to share it. I can. All right. So, since some some of you are just seeing this for the first time,
um overall about 950,000 of uh transfers to and from, which is about a little like 550,000 more than last year. So the it's looking like this year is going to be a little bit tighter than last
year, but um we'll go through and look at those accounts. Um first account, uh our town administrator, we got a new contract. So he was due some money and um
transferred about 36 thou half thousand there. And you can feel free to stop me anytime and ask questions if you want. Um, one of the main questions I have before we dig really deep into it is when is our vote on these transfers required? Is
this something that we can digest and then come back to a meeting next Monday to vote vote on? I believe that's fine. Yeah, I think um the select aren't voting on it until not next week, the following week.
Okay. Peter, do we typically vote on this after the select board or before or is there procedural or maybe you know Kevin? Does it matter? I don't think it matters. Last year I think you voted on it before the select.
Yeah, I don't think it matters. Um I I also would like to wait to vote on these. Um Kevin, how hard would it be to add the overall budget for each of these
line items? The beginning budget. Sure. Yes. The the current budget. So to say it's a $36,000 change, it matters whether it's a million dollar budget or a $50,000 budget. And you
know, without having to look back everything. It would be helpful to have some of that information here, right? Um, it wouldn't be that much work. No, I could do that. Yeah,
the uh the budget is available online if like but I know you would have to go back and forth comparing them and but uh to have it here in one place could be helpful for sure. All right. Should I move on?
Yes, please. Okay. All right. Um, next on the list is uh the town administrator. We budget for contract settlements. Um there's a lot of unions that go into the beginning of the fiscal year that aren't don't have a contract, aren't
settled. So we don't budget unknowingly. So that's usually what we use to do transfers to cover those collective bargaining agreements and personnel contracts. So we're pulling 116 and a half from
there. um town accountant, the assistant town accountant, she's part of the ask me union. Their contract wasn't settled until May of 2024. So, that was under budget uh certification.
This is for my um additional certification that wasn't budgeted for. It's the um MCPPO. uh the assessor the uh we had a contractual payout for our assessor who went to another town.
So a payout of a vacation I believe um clerical this would be uh another also part of the ask union
it's not budgeted for um consulting services we're pulling 16,000 from wasn't used um treasure the assistant treasurer collector. That position's been unfilled
for quite a while. Um, so we're taking 26,500 from there. Legal $15,000 transfer to um there was a lot of unanticipated personnel vehicle costs this year.
processing our computer support our IT um I don't know if some of you know but our IT company that we normally have had for quite a while tech was bought out and I was just I quickly looked back and just
compare how much we were paying them versus the new company we're using which is the 20 um and it was like $50,000 more but um once again like it costs are hard
kind of hard to predict too. And this also covers like equip equipment cost too. Um PEG big access uh insufficient budget uh unspent capital. So we just kind of
transfer within the peg. So that's covered. uh election and registration postage. This we moved all the um postage to the treasurer's department. She's the one
that handles the postage machine. So all the postage runs to her. This probably should have been cut out of the budget and moved to there. So none of none of that $10,000 was spent this year.
election budget. We're transferring 11,000 to other purchase services for additional voting booths. We got new vote uh voting booths. Cover that. We have to transfer 11,000. uh facilities, the old middle school,
we overestimated the maintenance costs um just based on the prior years actuals town meeting reports and warrants 3,000 we're transferring two um probably just due to increase printing costs.
police department. Um, this one's kind of large, but it it said we're transferring 125,000 to superior officers line. Um it looked like it just from previous contracts it was never
corrected but it's kind of offset by we were under budget in the regular officer's budget and also under budget in u educa education stipen
uh capital police capital we had to transfer money to cover um they overspent their free cash appropriation for um police cruisers uh just because we the costs were going
up and we only set aside I think 50 or $60,000 per cruiser when it's it's a lot more than that now. Uh dispatch has been a consistent like staff shortage. Um and
to cover that staff shortage the supervisor has to fill in which and other uh personnel have to fill in. So that's but overtime is so much fire. Uh this is
rather large. Firefighters um their collective bargain agreement was settled this fiscal year. So we didn't budget for it. Um we also like made a change in the contract where I
think um holiday pay is now built into their base. So um that's why you'll see that holiday over time is like that account number that account is short.
Um overtime for sick uh coverage for firefighters on FMLA. Um open shift. There was a firefighter on admin leave.
We have to take in firefighters to fill those shifts. Um, and there was sickly buyback. There's several uh firefighters who left and retired to pay pay their sick sick time
out. Um, building grounds. we're um transferring from there 45,000 um just lower like we didn't really know the true cost of the maintenance of the building so it's kind of hard to predict
and hopefully going forward we'll be a little more accurate with that number. um the Aspet school assessment that's only over 575, but they so they just sent us a revised um number in
September, so we weren't able to budget for that. Um DPW admin, we have the admin assistant who's been that position has been unfilled since Marie Morando left.
We're pulling 50,000 from there. Um, Highway has a lot of transfers, too. Um, some of you may know we had a we lost our lead mechanic. He was injured. So,
um, we had to use additional workers from a big cemetery to cover cover him and put the overtime is up and repair and maintenance that's up also because of that.
vehicles and supplies as well. Um, snow and ice, we just underestimated the deficit at town meeting. Some that bill must have come in after the fact. Uh, utilities we've been
doing pretty good on. So we were able to transfer 70,000 50 from fire fire station and 20,000 from street lights solid waste. This is um this came in lower than anticipated too.
Um which is good. Uh I think that's based on how much we actually how much the amount of trash. It's not the hauling is a set fee. So this is how much the disposal is
actually cost. Uh treatment maintenance. This has been historically underfunded. So we're transferring 34,000 to cover that. uh in municipal services we've had uh
we've been without conservation for a while now since um Julia left. So we're taking 40,000 from there. A lot of that, you know, we had to cover with
um Oh, I'm sorry. We also had to hire a um alternate building inspector and a health inspector on side. So, those two accounts for over council aging director. This is just a
budget incorrectly. $3,000 to the staff. This goes for um it's part of the ask me union agreement. Programs came in under budget. So we were able to take 9,000 from there.
Um veterans agent uh it was a payroll error. city was overpaid in FY25, but we'll correct that in 26. Um the benefits were also over, but they
should be offset by um reimbursements in the state. Um library director that was budgeted incorrectly as well. Next one's ad assistant director, admin
assistant, staff. Those were all part of the um asking union agreement and the hourly um staff was to cover uh absences and uh
staffing. uh Roosevelt building um that we had to transfer 19,500 to to cover uh emergency expenses um elevator, entrance stores, electrical,
etc. Um our debt service interest, long-term debt was short. um that was budgeted incorrectly due to a correction at town meeting that was just short because of the bond
premium. Um health insurance that's for you know we're usually under budget there. So we're able to pull most of our cover most of our cost of that. Um, Medicare has gone up
and liability insurance premiums are lower than expected. All I got. All right. Thank you for sharing that. Um, I've circulated it as well to the teams. Um, so we can get this posted for
our next if our next meeting. Um, kind of like Peter said, I I'd like to digest it a little bit and going through it um was helpful for me to frame uh frame that. Can I ask a couple questions?
Sure. Please. Are you sure? No. Uh Kevin, the schools, do they do a similar thing to this? Because you're not doing the school reconciliation, are you? Who does that for their general fund? Pardon?
For their general fund expenditures. Yeah. Do they or they don't have to do it? They they they do um Wayne White would prepare that. He hasn't prepared that for me yet, but and then the school committee would do the same process of approving any.
Um, yeah, I I would assume. Yeah. But as far as like their general fund budget, like we don't I'm not going to transfer anything out of there because they may transfer may do their own transfers, too. Yeah. I just quickly calculated this was
you said it was a lot, right? 954,000 and I just divided by about 25 million taking the schools out of it. I don't know what that would precisely be but it comes out to 3.8% which I thought see it seemed high. Do you have a standard that
you look towards? Three. Can you explain again where you got that? So you took the um $25 million budget from the schools out of that. I took well I I thought our last year's budget was roughly maybe 50 and about half of it's the schools so I just
roughly did 25 but um I mean it might be a little different but it does seem high and I I just don't know if there's a standard that we should be concerned about because it look it just looks to me like um we luck out with the 250 that the health
insurance was less than expected because what would happen if what would happen if that hadn't happened? I mean, will we go into a deficit for 25 FY25? Is that what would have happened? Um, well, I was actually when I was
working on this, I was considering having a reserve fund transfer done to cover. Yeah, that the fire was particularly over fire department in salaries because of those, you know, they hadn't leave and um FMLA.
So, it did shake out in the end. Um, yeah, historically we've always been under budget in health insurance. Okay. And I mean, we also budgeted
um that's 24. We also budget uh personnel contracts. So, any for contract settlements within the town administrators department. So, I'm not sure it's about the same for next year, I think. Um unfortunately too we you know
utilities came in under a lot. Yeah. And I mean a lot of them are made up by uh staff shortages which is you know it's a double-edged sword too when it comes to like police, fire and DPW where you have
to cover those positions. Yeah. with the overtime and and then the DPW expenses that was overtime because someone was otherwise they they didn't leave the position, right? You said loss of mechanic. They
just couldn't like extended sick leave or something. Yeah. So, we were still paying that and then we had to pay overtime as opposed to we had a minus when someone left leaves a position. So, we get some expected Okay. Thank you. That was great. Thank
you. All right. Um, so I'll I'll work with um the team to sort of gather any additional comments. um we have um and get them back to you in an email. Um and if we have any questions that aren't answered by email, uh I'm not sure if
you'll be available. I think we haven't set our next meeting yet, but I'm assuming it might be the the 28th, so next Monday. Um but that would keep you posted and I can uh if you want I can add in a
budget column to uh compare. Yeah, that would be much appreciated. Okay, thank you very much. You're welcome. All right, so um that is the transfer topic. Um, so
now, uh, I would propose we get into the capital planning committee topic. So, they've waited very patiently for us. Uh, and it's much appreciated. So, we're hoping to have a joint meeting tonight to sort of talk on capital planning and budget forecasting. Um, I
know that, um, Nathan's also been doing really great things with our sort of future planning tool, like a little spreadsheet, sort of planning out some general fund budget things. Um, so yeah. So I'm not sure if you all want
to present anything or otherwise. Um, yeah, let me get this started if I may. There are two main things I was hoping we could go over tonight. One is the long-term capital plan that Ben has been working on a lot. Um, the second thing I would like to teach you about and
suspect you might have questions is clear gov. Mike Lonza is with us tonight, part of our committee and also works for the Cleargo Gov software company. Um, the Clear Gov has been our main tool for putting together the capital plan and getting everything
organized in this town. Um, usually he's not allowed to advertise for it, but tonight I was going to give him special permission to tell us how great Clear Gov is, and you can decide whether or not it would benefit the town of Maynard and the finance committee for you guys to use once you know what it does. I'm
really only familiar with the capital planning aspects of it, but Mike knows everything. So, what would you like to hear about first? The long-term capital plan or the software we use to institute it. Well, we definitely want to hear about both things. I'm not sure if you think
one makes sense to talk about before the other one since you know them both well. All right, Ben, would you be willing and able to go first and talk about our capital plan? Sure. Yeah, definitely can. Screen sharing is enabled if you feel like using it.
Great. I will definitely do so. Um, let me share my screen. And may I ask if any materials that we talk about tonight, if there's any that you could send along after, we can get them posted on board docs. Yeah, for sure. We have them posted on the capital plan board docs too in the past. So, um, we will definitely make
sure we get them to final. I'll send them over when I'm done. Um, thank you. I want I want to talk about, uh, as Doug was saying, long-term capital planning. Um, so the the biggest thing here is that, you know, we have been working very hard as a committee to shift our
focus from one-year constant allocation of free cash into much more of like a long-term view of where we're looking at for the town. So, I want to start out by just diving right into some of the meat of the details and then we'll we'll we'll show you kind of the process here and then we'll get to the plan itself.
What you're seeing on the screen right now and if you all can see an Excel sheet, right, with some pretty colors on it. Yes, I see some heads. Great. All right. Cool. Cool. Cool. So, we took a a view where rather than getting to the point of deciding like what projects we should allocate, the first thing was
we need to look at what do we actually have in this town. And that's actually a relatively difficult question to answer. So, we inventoried every single asset this town had over let's call it like $20,000. Uh that means every single building, every single vehicle, every single piece of equipment down to the license plate and VIN number. So, we
have all that information now provided to us. From there, we start to look at, well, what are the things that are going to break and approximately when? So, rather than saying what we need to prioritize, let's pick our heads up and start to say, well, when are things going to fail? And so, right now, this view right here is the view of the
buildings. So, I want to start out with this kind of talk about the buildings. I'm going to very quickly touch on the uh non-building assets, so the vehicles and equipment, and I'm going to show you the plants up, kind of getting it uh all in together here and why it uh kind of works this way. So, I'm going to zoom in to make it a
little bit easier for people to see. And I'm going to start out by explaining the color coding. Color coding red indicates within the next 5 years we're going to need to do a major capital expense. There's a lot of red on the screen. It's not the best situation for us to be in. But if we think about this, for example,
the fieldhouse, if you didn't know, the fieldhouse right now, they're looking at uh ways with the historical commission of actually working on that building involving CPA funds. It's going to need a full rebuild. Now, it's not going to be a tear down type rebuild, but something that we are going to have to consider rebuilding. So, that's going to
go in the red category. Now, a roof, something in column E. Typically, the roofs in our town last anywhere from 20 to 30 years with an average about 25 years. As you can see, there are four major buildings that are going to need
roofs in the next couple of years. The worst one right now is the uh the junior high school, the Fowler building. And this is setting aside the DPW building, which roof is completely a failure at this point. But the Fowler building as well as the golf course building are two roofs that are currently failing. Uh as
of the report that Jonathan Brett received from the uh engineering firm that worked on the Fowler roof. The Fowler roof has been actively leaking for over three years now and there is water infiltration in the building. The extent of that water damage is not currently known. We might get into a
situation if we don't make decisions about this type of planning that we could get into a green meadow and or a golf course building where we're going to have to make capital choices that are going to be binding which could be a total rebuild or could lead to column G which is envelope. So envelope we can
think about as anything that needs actual structure within the building itself to be fixed. That means water infiltration, foundations, windows, things like that. We got a couple billions of that issue. Then last but not least, we have HVAC. I'm not going
to go into all the details here, but as a whole, everyone should keep in the back of their mind that recently Maynard passed an ordinance that required us to move forward with a green initiative. Meaning that typically speaking with our HVAC units, the units that are on top of the buildings, we are going to have to
remove from the top of the buildings, use heat pump technology on the sides of the buildings so that we can actually keep with that initiative that we've been uh, you know, we've adopted as a town. In addition, that will free up the roof of the building to allow us to use something like a solar put panels up on
top, which can then again meet those green initiative standards that the town chose to adopt a couple years back. So just FYI, HVAC's a lot more expensive because of that. We can do some repairs on the buildings we have, but at some point we're going to have to take them off the roof to meet that other initiative status. So again, just
something to throw out there. This is how we looked at all buildings. We looked at we chatted with uh DPW directors. We chatted with the department heads. We started to look at when are these things going to fail. Now there is also some good news. Some of these things when they do fail and they
need to be repaired, we can repair them over time. That's what we've been doing right now with some of our current HVAC systems. We've been slowly fixing the parts and we can keep uh you know tinkering with these things to keep them moving for a longer period of time. But again, as I mentioned, at some point they're going to have to come off. We
can patch the roof, but something like a fowler roof, we've patched it so many times, it's basically all patch at this point and not much roof left. So, we got to make a choice about how are we going to actually fix that. So this is buildings. Anyone have any questions on buildings? And I'm going to spend about
a third of the time on the other assets and then we're going to talk about the plan. Does anyone have any questions about the methodology associated with this right now? I have a question about what's what's orange. Orange is five uh 10 medium. Yeah. No, it's five to 10 year window.
So orange is five to the only thing that's in the five to 10 year window right now is the high school. The HVAC system will be phased out in about the 5 to 10 year mark. HVAC typically last about 20 years. Crazy enough, in 2033, our high school will be 20 years old. So, not a new building. Um, and then
yellow is um uh 10 to 15 years. Green is beyond 15 years. So, we don't have to start thinking about it quite so soon. Uh Ben, to what extent are the uh years to replace based on, you know, like a like an engineering assessment and to
what extent is it like roofs last 30 years and we're going to take the date of replacement and add 30 to it for instance? So the reds are typically engineering, oranges are we've been starting to have some failures, so we got to be worried about that. Yellow is exactly what you said. What I did was to
make this a best case scenario. If it's hey these things last typically 20 to 25 years we pick 25 years. So that's kind of how the the timeline is. You know the biggest thing with forecasting I think that this is really important. When I initially started this project I got a lot of push back from individuals saying this was not a worthwhile exercise
because we'll never be able to pick it. I will tell you right now this is wrong. There is no way that the high school roof is going to fail in 2038, the HVAC in 2033 and the envelope in 2043. 0% chance of assigning that. However, as a
town, this is approximately when these things fail. And if you talk to individuals like Josh Morse, who works in another town nearby, he looked at our approximation for roofs, HVAC, and envelopes, he goes, "That's kind of how we plan, too. Right around those windows." So, again, we picked the most,
you know, optimistic, meaning that at 20 25 years, we said Maynard's going to hold on for 25 years. But again, this that's kind of how we're looking at the yellows and the greens. The reds are junior high school, the roof needs to be repaired. We have an engineering report. The HVAC has been being repaired at $60,000 a year for the past couple of
years. Every other year or so, they had to do an emergency one um earlier in this year. Something like the uh the Glenwood Cemetery building. This is actively leaking right now. So, we got only a couple years left before that thing falls over. So, again, like we're to the point now where, you know, rubber
hitting the road. If that makes sense, Nathan. And what about the gray NAS like the last one, the wastewater treatment plant? Yeah. So wastewater treatment plants, all these NAS are ones that don't actually have these systems. So something like a wastewater treatment
plant that actually doesn't have an HVAC system involved in it. So the only way you'd actually rebuild that building is you tear it down. You know, the roof as well, but does it need a roof or no? No, they're designed to fail in modular standpoints. So they all fail at once. You wouldn't do a repair on it because you would have to do everything at once.
So it's better just to bol as well. I should note that water is really in sort of in our capital plan. You notice I don't have any comments over here in this final column over on this side because water is more in the water improvement plans that we have. So they're a little bit separate. So I will
hesitate to talk too much about water because there's already a very advanced plan, Linda, as you know from Justin about that. And would that be from the It wouldn't be from the capital budget. It would be from the water sewer enterprise fund. Correct.
Okay. All right. Um, moving on and as I move on, I will briefly touch on one other subject that Nathan I've I've sent over to him. So, given this with buildings and buildings is one of the biggest forms of our debt. Uh, I worked with the the town treasurer collector regarding
trying to determine out a very very very exact schedule for our debt servicing cost. I'll send this around too, but Nathan has this so that he can incorporate this in his uh financial planning tool as well. But this is the actual debt service and cost that our
town has agreed to at this point. Um the only things that are currently um questions is Green Meadow. You can see right here we've only have one official bond for the Green Meadow. There'll be three bonds. But approximately speaking, we can assume that the bonds are about 1/3.
Is it going to be exactly that? No. So that's the only estimate that is in here. Sadly, the estimate is the orange bars in the graph. But um I'll not talk too much about this because again there's not much work besides moving the data from the PDF files that we've agreed to in the bonds to the
spreadsheet. And Nathan's got this so I don't want to spend too much time on debt service for uh for that reason unless anyone has any quick questions. I really want to move on to assets and then the plan. I'll take silence as a good thing, but please interrupt me at will uh if you guys have any questions if anyone has
any questions. Okay, moving on uh to the uh the exact same status here happened with assets. I don't want to spend as much time um with assets because uh it's it's a very similar process with buildings except
for we're not going to worry about fixing the HVAC and a dump truck. We're just going to buy a new dump truck, right? Obviously, we have a mechanic on staff, so we are repairing these things over time, but as a capital planning committee, we're not going to try and forecast out when those individual parts fail. We're going to use as many parts
as we can into those vehicles until they actually fail and are no longer usable. We then send those vehicles to a salvage yard. We do make some money off the metal in the vehicles themselves and we go buy a new one. That's kind of how our process works. Um, if you haven't been over to the Maynard DPW garage, we run
our vehicles into the ground and then we try to resurrect them for another couple years and then we run them into the ground again. So, when we say these things are failing, it is literally they have soldered things together hoping for the best. Uh, we do have a snow uh plow
from 1968 that we still use. So, just to show that we still have some things from uh almost 60 years ago still rolling in our fleet. the chart right here. Oop, excuse me. I'm going to zoom in on the chart for everybody's standpoint. This is our fleet and equipment managing costs that
are forecasted. So again, this is not prioritized. This is failure points. So as was noted earlier, well, some of these things we're not going to be 100% sure on. We're a lot more confident in the next couple of years than we are in the later couple of years, as one could
imagine. Um, so for example, you and you can see we have funding source as well here that I will go through a lot more in detail when we get to the plan. But we have actually brought all this information out by again by VIN, by plate, by department, by year that it
was purchased, by the type of vehicle, everything. The one thing that we know very clearly though if I look at this graph is that we have agreed with the police department so far that every other year we give them one or two police cruisers on a one two one two basis. So that's
something that is a reoccurring expense that we can plan for. Um so again that's just something to to take note of in this case. Um besides that we have a lot more of the like the larger capital uh assets. So, we have dump trucks, we have um wood
chippers, we have uh uh back hose, we have all that stuff we have to talk about. We have all that information and and phased in. I think it's best to not talk about it here and move over to that plan itself unless anyone has any objections for the fleet management side of things to go right into that final
detail there where I think the meat of the conversation will be. I will again take silence as a good thing. I know I'm throwing a lot at you, so please don't hesitate to interrupt. And again, I'm sure there'll be follow-up questions at a later point. So, all that being said, we took the
buildings and we took the vehicles and assets and all that. We put it together in the plan. And this is what Doug was alluding to, which is the long-term capital plan. I thought it was important to go through the initial building blocks and how we got here. Starting out, I'm going to dive into 2025 because we've all seen this, but
2025 was what we actually presented at Springtown meetings. So, this is the free cash estimates and other port uh components that were in that warrant article. You can see here under free cash, we did the town hall HVAC, library stairs, all that stuff. I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but we also
had reoccurring expenses. We bought that police cruiser that I just mentioned to you. Um, we also contributed $75,000 in reoccurring expenses to stabilization in other capital projects. In this case, just stabilization was what we actually allocated to. I'll come back to that
point when we go into 2026. Justin DeMarco separately presented a warrant article regarding water and sewer retained earnings being used to purchase water and sewer vehicles that is allowed within the enterprise fund that if a piece of equipment is used by
the water and sewer department, they can purchase it water and sewer enterprise funds. It's something that is uh important to note because we have actually an extensive water and sewer fleet that is currently our worst part of our fleet as it hasn't been replaced in many years. These are some of their
oldest trucks, dump trucks, those types of things. So, just an FYI. 2026 is going to be a good one for us to sit down and really sit and talk about here. And the reason for that is this is something we've never actually done. We haven't looked at this type of capital
plan yet. This is next year. These are things that are going to fit. As I noted uh regarding buildings, we've already kind of talked about here. I'm going to highlight the buildings on the screen. The first one's the Glenwood Cemetery building. As I mentioned, the envelope
of that building, that building is falling apart because there's water intrusion. So, chatting with Justin, he goes, there's probably going to be need $50,000 repairs before so we don't have to knock that thing over next year. That thing is actually having structural problems uh like some of our other buildings. That's going to be one of
those repair moments to our the envelope of that building over there. The DPW garage I penciled in. I understand it's a dangerous pencil in folks, but it's something we all have to be cognizant of that 67ish million dollar project that's been presented. Not sure where that's
going to go. That might not be in 2026, but I thought I put it there because we're talking about it now. So, we all are talking about this. The whole idea here is to have that conversation. Third is the follower school roof. Again, we've already had an engineering firm come out and give us some bids on
it. There are two parts of the roof. Um, the first part is the more dangerous part, which is the actual sloped version. And when I say more dangerous, that's where the leaks are occurring. Uh, that was considered a total failure, and there is water intrusion. There's also a flat part of the building. The flat part of the building is rated as
very poor, though not a total failure. So, you might get another year out of that. That's going to be another million bucks on top of the 2.5, depending where it's going to be. Jonathan Brettz will note that there's multiple options on the table of Fowler. We can go with uh different uh types of views there depending on the type of material we
actually use for that roof. And then last but not least, you'll see there are three line items here for the golf course building. Now, this again is a little bit disingenuous because it's really two options. We can go with the 1.2 plus million option of doing the
roof and the water remediation componentry, which will cost about 1.2 2 million, not fixing anything inside, but just again the outside of the building gets fixed. Or number two is you could do something like a total rebuild, which could cost upwards of $2 million. So again, we should note that this is just
making the building stand up. It's not necessarily making the building nice. I think that's something else we always have to be balancing in our head of what's the goal of the the groups. And then um about as I noted before the HVAC at Fowler has been failing for the last couple of years. Conservatively
estimating another $75,000 we'll probably have to spend on those units. Last year was 60. The year before that we didn't have to spend anything. The year prior to that was 65. 75 seems about conservative for about how much it might cost.
And then we start getting into some of these other projects here. Uh we don't have a town wood chipper. You might say to yourself, why do we need a wood chipper? We can talk all about that. There's actually some pretty good reason for disaster management recovery. We're trying to find some ways of not spending free cash on something like that. Uh we
need a new dump truck. Our one dump truck is in the going to the scrapyard. So, we're down a dump truck. Uh we have two vehicles up for the police, which is in purple. We have um some reoccurring expenses. Uh one of them is fire equipment, which is $40,000. The um
excuse me, the uh the police cruisers uh is right here at $130,000. My fault. There we go. $130,000. Um, I apologize. The purple police cruisers, I misread my spreadsheet. These are refurbished. So, these are not
vehicles that we actually have to pay for. When we buy two new police cruisers that are undercover vehicles or vehicles that are not marked, that say police on the side. We take those vehicles and we hand them to Justin DeMarco and they use them as admin vehicles for the DPW. So,
this uh refurbishment is actually in reality a net credit to our our town, which is great. We save $130,000 for not buying Ford Explorers. But I think the biggest items here are going to be these two, right? I'm going to highlight.
This is not designed to be a capital plan in the sense of prioritizing these things. This is designed to be a capital plan in the sense of what is going to fall apart and what decisions are we going to have to make in every single year going forward. In order to do that,
sorry, you might hear my screaming newborn in the background. Um, in order to do that, we need to also allocate those ad hoc expenses we're not going to know. We're going to have to make a decision about are we going to invest in
a new software for our police department? That's something that's going to be in that line 10, that other capital projects line. We might have to invest additional funds in something uh that breaks like the water man that broke the other day downtown. You know,
that's something that we don't know. We might have to spend extra money on. We might have an HVAC unit that fails 10 years early. We might have to go spend cash on it. You know, these are the priorities and projects that we meet one-on-one with the individual department heads. We're only giving ourselves a $400,000 budget to do that,
which is pretty low compared to where we've been in the past. The other big item is roadways. Our town consulted with an engineering firm, VHB, to actually look at our roadways and said, "How much money do we need to spend to get our roadways and sidewalks back in shape?" Roadways alone
to get us back to where we need to meet state minimum standards in a 5-year period was $400,000 extra dollars a year. on top of the added additional dollars that we got in chapter 90 funding this year on top of the dollars that we get from the state millionaires
tax. I have personally been on the phone with Senator Eldridge and Sen Representative Hogan about this stuff. This is going to be brutal. You know, that's how it's going to cost. That does not include sidewalks. That does not include accepting new roads. That's just
where we're at today. So, I'm like, these are reoccurring expenses we should know in the back of our head. And then last but not least is water retained earnings. As I mentioned, two vehicles can be purchased using the water and sue retained earnings. So again, this is really like a failure plan more than a
capital plan. It's how are we going to fix the things that are failing and what are they? What are the decisions we're going to have to make in 2026? Those decisions are golf course probably something we're going to have to make a decision on. That building is falling apart. Fowler roof, that's going to be a
decision we're going to have to make in FY26. Uh uh DPW garage rebuild. That's going to be a decision we're gonna have to make whether we actually pay for it that year or the next year. Um the HVAC probably gonna have to make that call. Dump truck. We need a new dump truck.
We're literally sending it to the scrapyard. So these are the decisions we're going to have to be starting to make. And then whatever else comes our way. How much do we want to pay for roads? Maybe we can't do 400k next year. Maybe we can only do 100. Maybe we can only do five. I don't know, right? Other
capital projects, stabilization. Our stabilization budgets are lower than they've been in a very long time. So, if we have another situation like the um petroleum leak at the DPW garage, $700,000 expense. So, it's like these are the things that we're going to have to talk about. I'm not going to go into
every one of these years for this purpose meeting, but we have the exact same layout for 27, 28, 29, and 30 that we can summarize and look at from all the different funding sources. These are tough decisions we're going to have to come out to. But the good news
is the work that capital planning has done is we've gotten to the point where we can track individual assets in a schedule in a way that's going to help us say, "Wow, we have some big choices to make. We have some debt choices to make, free cash choices to make, some things to do. We need to start looking
with our eyes open. And again, the as Doug said in here as we shift this into clear gov, we actually go out to 2055. So, we can look at all these failure points. Um, the next couple years, lot of failures. So, we got to be really cognizant of that. I'll pause for
questions or comments at this point. I did want to make a comment just to say that this is this is a very um very good spreadsheet and it I think this is a really good way to look at it. It's brought to light a bunch of things that I wasn't aware of. Um so I think
this is a really great tool. Thank you. I think for going through it so clearly. I think Nathan and I are competing for the fanciest spreadsheets. I think that's what it comes down to. You both get gold stars. I've got a question for you, Ben.
Lot lot of unforeseen expenses coming up soon. Uh what's the town of Maynard going to do to pay for all this stuff? Sounds like it's going to be expensive. So Doug's right. Uh obviously very expensive. So, one of the things about opening eyes to all these projects is uh
that yeah, you're going to start totaling these things up. We used to talk as capital planning that we had our eyes about 150 million dollars in projects uh over the next 30 plus years. That number's a lot bigger because you have all these buildings and everything else they're going to have to be discussed.
What are we going to do about that? Well, that's where again, we know that we have some debt servicing coming off in the next couple of years. We also know that we have some debt servicing coming on. So you have the debt question you can start to discuss. Um number two is reallocation of funds and that's
something I think FinCom we need to talk about. You know one of the things in 26 as I click over here that we can talk about that other towns do is this roadways. Other towns use the vehicle excise tax or a portion of that to pay for their roadways to actually meet the roadway budget. That is not something Mayor has
done in the past. That's something we could do. We could make that decision. Now what does that do? that pushes other funds down the the stack, right? You're putting other priorities at other points down the stack. The other thing that Doug to answer your question is uh you
know bundling by going in here and knowing these things and actually knowing that this stuff's all going on at the same time, we can make better choices. The things that irk me is that because we didn't see this uh you know have this perfect foresight is we're going to make some really we're going to
be forced to make some really bad choices. For example, on number seven, if we choose to knock down the the golf course building, which is an option that I think should be seriously considered, in doing so, we will have put in a brand
new boiler system and heating system in that building in 2013, which should last us until about 2040 that we will bulldo if we were to do that. We put in hundreds of thousands of dollars in that building for that purpose. That's unfortunate, but we also have to weigh
the pros and cons that HVAC unit being in there and the fact that we're going to spend million about the same amount of money to just repair and try to renovate where we're at. So, I think the idea, Doug, is that I don't have an answer for how we're going to pay for it besides debt and raising taxes, which
sucks, or reallocating funds, which suck. Uh, but we're at least going to do it by knowing the information we need to know to make these decisions today. So that's the tough part. We're going to have to make really tough calls or select borders I guess in the town.
Thank you so much for that presentation. Ben, anyone else have any questions? I know unmute there or Linda. Um, Ben, I had a just to follow up on that about the sources of funding, how we're going to pay for this is in your spreadsheet, how do you like say with roadways, we know
we get a certain amount of state funding every year, I believe chapter 90 or whatever, and how do you build that in or like what we're projecting we're going to get from the state? Great question. Uh, so this is net of all those projections. So that means
this is the remainder that 400k. So, but the but it's in so it's in the cost but not in the resources. Um no no uh sorry maybe I misinterpreted. So when I say we have 400k I'm saying we're going to have to spend 400k on roads and sidewalks after we get state funding.
Um okay so yeah. So in real life is that a good way to do it? Well anyway so that's good. So it's a net So it's net net in for roadways. Anything else that's net like that? Nope. That's it. The only one that's netted out. And the reason for it, I
just didn't want to get into the chapter 9 discussion, but I'm more than happy to. Basically, we have like 500k in chapter 90 plus the fair share act, though they actually, I'm not sure if you guys caught it, they cut the fair share allocation this year. So, we're not going to get that 535. We're expecting to 535,000 the state. We're
going to get a little shy of that because they they decreased our our fair share. We're increasing our chapter 90. Uh that took me a little while to try and figure out where that how that happened, but uh just FYI. So, we're going to get like 400 something, I believe, at the end. And then we just saw an email that we
got 2.1 million grant for some water thing. Yeah. Um is can we factor in or be more aggressive in other kinds of external funding like that? Is there any possibility on any of these projects? That's a great question. So the 2.1
million extra dollars in the the funding for the water and sewer first off you know that's obviously earmarked for water and sewer which is out of scope for this project purpose but I think everybody should I say this I'll say this very plainly but also say this try to lightly take it
how you will. We currently have two of the highest ranking members in the state house as our state senator and state representative. We have the majority whip in the house of congress as our representative. We if you look at the allocation of money that Maynard gets on earmarks from our state, we get a ton more than we
should. So, I hate to say it, but right now is the gravy train. And we've been doing a pretty good job at actually allocating a lot of this funds. So, for example, like the 400k that we got for the um the the light over by uh um the uh couple of you know, we're going to
really hope that we get that $500,000 for that HVAC grant that we're looking forward to redo the school. Sorry, the school. My fault. the town hall HVAC because we only allocated 275,000 for that HVAC which is going to cost 3/4 of a million, right? So, it's like we're we're doing a lot and Justin's been
working hard on that the water and sewer stuff which is obviously on top of each other's minds, but we're really running out. They're uh right now, last thing I'll say is they're creating a new traffic and safety committee uh in the town which is going to try and go after safe streets grants to help us out with
the um some of the intersections which is part of the capital plan that are a million bucks a piece and you can get million-dollar grants going after those types of safe streets things and working with the planning board. They're just working on standing up that type of committee. But again, there is a lot of
people in town working to get that stuff done. Could we do better? Sure. But I think we're doing a hell of a job. I think it's just gonna it's tough. It's a lot of money. And then for the schools, Ben, you've got a really good model for the buildings, but what about the grounds? I
mean, we heard, you know, when we did the bleachers, we t a lot of people at town meeting were talking about, well, we shouldn't do the bleachers until we do the fields. Um, how do we model that? I mean, that seems like that seemed like that had a millions of dollars. And is
there anything else like fields like open space or other infrastructure that we need to be worried about? Guess I don't know what I'm thinking about. Well, I the people talk about Memorial Park even redoing that and um yeah, they I love the idea that keeps
adding up, you know, with the fields, you know, that's a very tough one. I I did not do the fields because I know they can't bring the bleacher vote back for a while with regards to bleachers. You know, if they change the scope, they'd do that. I think we'd hear more rumblings on it, but I don't even want to pontificate about how much it would cost to redo the
drainage on a high school field or redo the fields themselves. Um, so I did not include that in there. You know, Memorial Park is one of our uh capital plans uh items. We actually have a line item for the redoing of Memorial Park along with redoing some of the main street areas themselves. Um, you know,
that would fall under these plans under this one bucket of free cash for $400,000. Okay. Yeah. The problem is those projects cost millions. like, you know, how do we do that? And I think that's something that's really important to note is one of the things you can do with a plan like this is you
could take all $400,000 and put it in stabilization. Do no other projects and then next year you'd have $800,000 that you could then go tackle on those bigger projects. That's where we can start forward thinking about these types of projects and plans. Yeah.
And then you had DPW garage at 67 million. In my mind, it was going to be 23 million. Am I Am I wrong? Is 67 is right. 67's a new number. It's a I was I'm sorry. I was in LA. Thanks, Ben.
No. Phase one. There's different levels, but I did 67. That's the middle. There's 65 67 I think a 72. Uh, but someone can quote me on 72. So, I picked the middle one. Yeah. Okay. And Bob McCarthy, I know you had your hand up. I apologize. He dropped off. Uh, this is Jonathan
Brett. Uh the community preservation um has money or money available for open space, recreational space. Uh and they do a lot of projects in town. They could do things with Memorial Park. Uh they
actually own the golf course right now. Uh so um and we're in discussions with the town about what to do with the building golf club itself and how to how to sort of
un get the community preservation out of of being the owner of the building itself. Uh we're only supposed to be the owner of the open land. the uh but there is for parks and open space there is the community preservation and also until a
town department comes forward with a identified need we aren't necessarily going to know about it so it may not be in this plan great comment and and Jonathan to add on to that the fieldhouse uh that I mentioned right here I have CPA as a potential source of
funding on this one in 2027 because that's a historical building the cemetery building as well That's technically a historical building as well in the town. It's something that could be discussed, but the CPA has limited funds, too. They can't go and spend millions upon millions. So, that's something else we all have to be
cognizant of. There's only so much of the pie to go around. Any other comments, questions, or thoughts? Um, go ahead, Peter. Oh, hey, Peter. So I guess my question goes to more the
Can you go blow this up a little? I guess the one that had the 67 million on it. Yep. Yeah. So part of me looking at this says, well, we we need to prioritize and as I would
look at this, I'd say we don't need a golf course clubhouse. and that and I'm not quite sure what the Glenwood Cemetery building is, but do we really need that? And why,
you know, something like Fowler roof replacement? That to me is a no-brainer for the top priority that we're going to lose of, you know, $50 million school over the roof. And that would be really shortsighted. Um,
the DPW garage I I mean I just think it's a fantasy. It's never going to pass a town meeting. I think there's some role for one of our committees to go back and say you can have 20 million and do something with
that or do nothing, but there is absolutely no way you can have 67 million. And that's part of this. I don't know what committee does that and I think you know FINCOM may start to do that or say
something more publicly but this is the prioritization we need that you know this is an undoable list in a lot of ways. Yep. As far as far as the town the DPW
garage um the select board is actually in discussions with Actton about regionalizing DPW services. So that's one way. Yep. They discussed that at their their select board meetings. So, two members
of our select board have actually started started reaching out to active because they also just recently failed passing a new DPW garage as well, right,
Peter? And I I would say to your comment, you're right. Like that's the the idea here is to put down on the tables like what's failing and when and then we got to make decisions. And the idea is right now is like not trying to pump these things down the road. I I
wrote an email to Greg Johnson the other day and I'll publicly say what I told him. I said you need to put together a commit a building committee for the next five years that look at all these building projects and make decisions. I'm like because there's a point where
we can tell you and advise but like we need to start putting pen to paper about how we going to do this and what we're going to do. The interesting thing about the golf course is you can actually theoretically you could bond out this $2 million golf course rebuild. You could
bond that out using the golf course receipts on a yearly basis as a dedicated cash flow line. So that the receipts come in, you debt service it and you could retire the golf course. You could also knock it down and never have to do anything about the building again. So long as CPA and all the legal stuff gets done. Those are questions
we're going to have to have. But these are decisions we have to make. And the longer we wait to make one of those choices, the more these repair choices increase in cost and the more that the only option is really to do a total rebuilder and knock it down, you know,
so we pigeon hole ourselves at some point. But, you know, your comic, Peter, I agree with you. Everything you just said, 100%. But I would be I I mean I guess I'm not going to say I have enough knowledge to totally advocate this, but
I kind of think of the golf course building right now the way, you know, we treat vehicles. We should run it into the ground and then tear it down and then, you know, put up a trailer to take the money
and stop pretending that we have a bar there and a function room. I mean, the my the cash flow from the golf course, you know, is less than I mean, it's like $80,000 a year. Yep. I don't know how much bond that actually gets us.
Yeah. You have 30-year bond. Fully agree. You know, I I like I said, that's one of the options on the table, but we have to make that decision. Like, I don't know how much I don't know who has to scream at who to be like, put this on a meeting. We can't get Capcom to
present this information on Select Board. Like, I I don't know, you know, we're trying our hardest to get like this info in front of people and we got to make these calls. And it's like, I fully agree. We should the the golf course. We need to I'm sure there's going to be people that want a town
survey and a town discussion and that's very important. We want to bring people in, but we got to make those decisions sooner rather than later. So that if we want to put up a temporary trailer, that's a great idea. That's going to cost money. It's like we got to make those calls. But I agree with you.
You're speaking a lot of truth, Peter. I love it. But yeah, I mean, great work on this. I know it's Yeah, there's nothing easy. All right. Is that everything covered for the plan and the questions?
Uh I I had a question about the um about like the schedule of replacing vehicles. Um because on the one hand we drive uh vehicles into the ground. You mentioned a snow plow from 1968 that's still in service, but there's also a recurring, you know, every every year at town meeting we're we're getting some new
vehicles. Um you mentioned the commitment to uh the police station and getting new cruisers on a two one year and then one two years later every other year, right? Um is that something that is that like already like stretched as far as it could possibly go? Um, are we
like legally bound to the commitments that we've already made? Do you have any more information on that? So, it used to be 2222 uh and we got down to 2121 21. So, we made improvements. Uh, nothing legally bound. I believe that was the discussion that
was happened uh even before my time in that case. But, you know, you're right, Nathan, in the sense that we we do have to replace vehicles regularly. And the reason for that, if I may, is we own um a ton of vehicles. Um this is so currently owned. Here we go. I'll give
you the owned level of vehicles. We own 81 vehicles. So the idea is we got to do this stuff all the time because we got 81 of these things laying around. So if you think about a vehicle a year, whose car lasts 81 years?
No one's. So the the concept here is that there's a lot of vehicles because we got a lot of vehicles in town. Like we we got to be constantly replacing these. And again, this is a little bit disingenuous. This is equipment. This is vehicles. This is trailers. This is all of our equipment. But in reality, you got to be replacing these things every
20ish years. It's hard not to keep this cadence up. And if what happens right now is if we fall behind like this past year we only got um you know one vehicle done you know and it was a cheaper vehicle is the Ford uh F-150 or sorry F350 you know next year we're going to
have that dump truck that's a $325,000 vehicle that's a lot of F350s but our dump truck is gone you know so it's like those are the decisions we're going to have to start making so uh but that's why there's a lot of I couldn't believe how many vehicles there's downs and this is a number that's been shrinking
So, we're actually in a good shape vehicle wise compared to where we were. Uh, which is shocking to me, too. That help answer your question? Yes, definitely. All right. Uh, enough for me unless you have questions. I'll send these all over to Jillian. Uh, Doug, Mike, take it
away. All right. Would you guys be interested in learning about Clear Gov software tonight? I mean, you can say no, but we'll end the meeting early or we could learn some more. Up to you, finance people.
I, as one member, would be very interested because I think we've talked about potentially using this instead of using the Excel spreadsheets. I agree. Okay. My starting thing would just be I thought the town already did use Clear Gov.
Uh, we use Clear Gov. Uh, I understand you guys do not use clear gov. Well, us except does not use I thought the town was using clear gov for the budgeting and that that was active last year.
They they are and I can speak a little to this. I can add some color to this. Um, so I'm actually an employee of Cleargov. Um, been with the company for 5 years. We're based out of the mill. Uh right now the town is subscribed to
three modules but there are um quite a few more. It all depends on where you need help in your budget process. Whether that be the capital, the personnel budget, the operating budget, if you need help being transparent presenting your budget figures, whether
that be through a transparency portal or through an interactive annual budget book. There's also strategic planning. There's also digital financial reporting. So the the company's really grown and we've we've grown out to support different areas of budgeting and
you can think of it like an alocquart menu where depending on where you need help and where you want to replace those spreadsheets you can of course subscribe to those modules and and that's exactly what it's meant to do is to create a repeatable scalable budgeting process to
make it easier for staff uh and and officials to save time and just have a smoother um better flowing process with a more forward outward thinking um view. Uh it's amazing how much time gets lost in the minutia of spreadsheets and it
pulls away staff from other more important work. So hopefully that's a helpful preface. Any questions on that? Was that helpful? I can speak to what the town has too and what we use. I I don't suppose you have like like any
like sample of uh what it would look like. I just have like a hard time understanding what it would be without getting into the detail. Yeah. Let me share my screen here. Can everyone see my screen? Okay. Yes, I see it.
Excellent. Thanks, Doug. Uh so right now I'm logged into Cleargov. Um you can see the modules that we have subscriptions to the transparency portal, operational budgeting, capital budgeting. Um there are other modules too as I mentioned
like strategic planning, personnel, capital project tracking, budget book. We also have a licensing and permitting module. Um but these tools like capital budgeting, this has enabled the capital planning committee uh to be able to come in here and run scenarios as well as to
more easily collect and manage capital requests from our department heads. So department heads are actually submitting their requests in cleargov through forms that we've set up. So we have forms as you can see on the
screen for every type of request whether it be uh an improvement like a um a building maybe it's an equipment maybe it's other there's going to be a form related to that and we're going to be able to collect like water and sewer all the necessary information
surrounding the request. This is going to reduce the back and forth the emails phone calls misinformation right where people aren't seeing the same things. Um, so this is going to have all that information. We've also implemented a scorecard. Scorecarding is really powerful and I
just want to speak to that. This is letting us create criteria that matters most to the community, right, to the town. And we're able to apply waiting. So when a department head goes in and they rank their request, the scorecard is actually going to give us a total
based off what we determine to be the most impactful criteria, right? and you can choose that criteria and you can adjust the waiting as needed, but it gives us actionable uh insight into the request. So, it's it's not just a matter of what's the department head's priority, it's how does this fit the
town and what we've identified as um the most important thing based off the criteria. But all this information can be collected here. They can upload images, attachments, we can capture costs. So here you can see capital costs as well
as historical and future fiscal years. We can see funding sources as well. So it's a way for us to again figure out how much is going to be requested from each fund for each fiscal year. Um all this information of course and there's other info too like project location and
we also have an internal use only. But that's just an example of one of the forms. Once we've got the forms, we're then able to run scenarios. I'm lo This is my uh my town account. So, it looks like I don't have my scenario there. Essentially, the
scenario would let you play around with what if we funded this project, what if we funded that, what if we pulled money from this fund, what if we pushed this out into a future fiscal year. The idea of these scenarios is that you can then present it via this dashboard.
So this dashboard, I mean, candidly, Ben did an amazing job um with the presentation, and I think he hit the nail on the head, which is it's it's a pretty big number, right? It's um it I hope everyone sees that. It's over half a billion dollars.
Just let that sink in. Um but what we can do here is we can of course sort this. We can look through specific budget years. We can look at departments. We can look at the type of requests if we want. We can filter all of this. And then we can run scenarios too. So if we want to run uh you know in
in this scenario we're including everything. But this software the capital budgeting modules enabled the committee the capcom um to really more easily run these scenarios, collect the requests and come up with what's possible and not spend you know and not
have it be like another day job doing so. Um, so that's capital budgeting. Uh, operational budgeting, which I don't believe I have access to the town's I don't have access to the town's account um for operational
budgeting, but this is a place where department heads would submit their main operating requests and then um Greg as well as the finance team would be able to put together different budget versions. you can easily go from you know proposed to uh
adopted amended and then that would um be available to see as well in the transparency portal. Transparency is going to be a place where you can showcase things like financial data, projects, um dashboards if you want to show department uh
progress, but it's a way to be um clear to residents about uh whatever you want to, but most importantly the financials, right? So hopefully that's a helpful overview. I could have I can log into my uh demo account if you'd like to see this with
more content in here. Um again I am not uh a part of the operating budget for Maynard so I can't see that right now. Um but the capital the capital I can certainly show you as we saw via that dashboard. Was that helpful? I feel like I've done a lot of talking. Any any
questions? Uh yeah I I kind of have a question for Ben actually. um just like the way he everything was presented in that spreadsheet made a lot of sense to me. Um clear gov I the main benefit to me seems to be to have like one source of
truth that everybody in town can be like going back and referencing but the actual way the information is presented. Um it's harder for me to like comprehend. You know that that's like just like a really big number up at the top. Um, I imagine there's lots of ways to like
filter based on the different priority numbers that you were showing earlier, but Ben, uh, where's like the overlap between the spreadsheet that you were just presenting and the information that's been submitted by all the departments in clear gov already? Does that information live in both places?
It does. Yeah. So, it's identical in both places, too. So, if you go Yep. Mike is half way ahead. So, Mike's already looking at the uh So, he just filtered out by to 2026. So, if Mike um scrolls to the projects themselves, um so he filtered by a year in 226. And if
you scroll down, Mike, and kind of look at what the costs are. Here we go. So, as we mentioned before, there's $130,000. That first line item for police cruisers, that's right in there. So, we know exactly what those ones are. We also know the next two vehicles down, that 90,000, that 80,000, those are the
two Ford pickup trucks. And Mike, if you click one of those guys for me and kind of zoom in on the project. Uh, great. So, if you re look at here, it says, um, it's replacing the DPW Ford pickup truck. It tells you the license plate, the VIN number, all that. And
Mike, you keep scrolling down. Tells you the cost per year, how much going to cost, the budget in which year it's going to be. And then it says water and sewer retain earnings because that's the water and sewer based uh uh project that I mentioned you before, Nathan. So, everything is zoomed in here and
individuals can actually go in and look at these things. I did notice a typo there. It did say a highway DPW highway Ford. That's incorrect. I see that replaced the highway Ford one. But moral of the story is everything relates to the spreadsheet and goes back and forth. But Mike, if you go back to request
manager for us, I think Nathan, one of the most powerful things is um and you go to um Justin's requests and just kind of look at his uh requests there and find his his public books works garage. That building. That's perfect. Click
that second one for me, Mike. Um, so as you scroll down the description here, it explains what everything is. Uh, and it should have had, yeah, so it has the feasibility website at the very top there. That's all linked hyperl together. And keep
scrolling down a little bit further. Mike, I just saw I was looking for There we go. Supplemental attachments. So we can now add all of our email correspondents, all the PDFs, all these things. If you found the follower roof, you would get the report from the engineer that's in there. You would get the cost breakdown of things. you would
get the follow-up emails and stuff. Think about this as like your central tool for all the stuff we get and it links to my spreadsheet. I can never do on my spreadsheet. I only did the spreadsheet because it was faster for me to actually do it on a spreadsheet as we tried to really upload all this stuff.
Clear gov allows me to import things directly in. So, I built it all in a spreadsheet very quickly and then bulk uploaded all the projects that were uh that we needed to make edits on to make it very uniform on naming convention. the dates were we having a little problem with our our initial dates and
stuff like that. So that's the the big update there. And no, I'm not a play paid clear gov person whatsoever. It's just that it's very helpful to to bring all that info together for us. So that's why Nathan, another benefit just to chime in is um scalability. Uh if if Ben were to leave
Maynard, uh I think we would all be at a at a big loss for the work that he does. Having this being in a system like clear gov, right? Creating that repeatable, scalable process. This is something again we're we're thinking long term. We want to create a a system that we can
hand off and another group can take over when we're ready to move on. So I think that's a really important thing here. spreadsheets as the town grows, as costs balloon, as as we get more and more requests, it it just simply it it's not
scalable and it's too timeconuming and it's too chaotic and to your point, Nathan, having a source of truth, right? There's a lot of value in that. Then last thing I'll say is when we do a new year, so next year, let's we finish up this new plan, we report a town
meeting in the fall, in the spring, we're all good. All we do is we take we import over the 26 plan and 27. It moves all the years to tell you like what's coming up next. You check what you actually paid for. It removes it from the plan. You have your new plan ready
to go. So, think about this as a living document where when Angela calls us and says, "Oh my gosh, I need some new uh a new piece of equipment, a new stretcher on my ambulance because that's getting, you know, it's getting older." she calls us, she says that she can put this right in there and we now see that oh in 2026
this is her number one priority because our stretcher is broken and it goes through all of our system and we can very quickly see it. So it's also our way of communicating with the department heads. So it's all like linked together in that sense and this was really again this is Mike
Doug John Larkin before uh myself you know this was really them pushing this whole thing over. I've just been the most recent adopter of it from the from our team. But we all use this. We all have access to it. Um, and I think you all should have access to it too or some of you all do.
Can absolutely give you access. There's no additional cost to users, training and support. The the company really wants our our our customers to make the most out of this investment. So, if you guys want access to this, more than happy to get you in there. Can also schedule a time for
training. There's also a online learning center, too. So, um you can learn uh as you want through the academy, too. But definitely we're we're paying for operational and capital. Um I don't know if you guys need capital access, but operational be happy to get you in there
if that's something you'd like to do. And Fincom could run their own operating budget scenarios or versions which you could then present and you could compare to Greg's. The other benefit too is that once we've chosen our capital plan, we
can actually link it to the operating budget with a few clicks. So what I mean by that is all the funding for each capital request that we've chosen to fund, that's going to flow over into the operating bucket, into the right account IDs, the right buckets, so to speak. Um,
so there's a really big benefit to again not doing this work in spreadsheets and and leaning on software and candidly the way personnel costs are. This is kind of the the I work with finance teams across the nation. There's 1,400 customers. Um
this is the way of the world now. Staff is and personnel costs are rarely funded and they're very expensive. Leaning on software is is the new norm. So hopefully that's helpful. Michael, do you know if the operating
module does the kind of work that Nathan's doing, which is projecting, you know, projecting like what the increases will be. Um, yes. Yes, it does. It does. Okay. Okay.
You can um have department heads, so there's a few ways to do it, but you can also have department heads start forecasting. Okay. something that I would really encourage us to maybe make as a requirement um to have that that forecast. We we should be getting this information like from Justin from these
other department heads because they're closest to these these these costs, right? So they they'll have a better sense of, you know, talking with Angela, fire trucks, um our fire truck, the same community, a same a similar community nearby bought the same truck one year
later. I think she said it was like $100,000 more simply because of when they placed the order due to ballooning costs. So, we want to know that uh and and collecting that forecast would be really helpful. Can you show us what the operational
budgeting looks like? Yeah. Yeah, I can. I just have to as Mike's doing that everyone, I just want to say thank you very much. I have to drop u I as you those might know I have a newborn so I gota go help out uh before we gota go. So anyway if you have questions Jillian I sent you the
documents that I presented tonight please send those over to fin and upload those to board docs but I do apologize I have to drop early but it was a pleasure chatting with you all tonight. Thank you Ben. Thanks Ben everyone. See you Ben. Right.
So, I'm logged into my fictional uh Lonza Lake community. It's just a demo account I use. Um we we updated the back office, so you can see it's a little bit streamlined here. Looks like that hasn't hit the uh town account just yet. Um but in terms of the uh operating budget, so
under budgeting, capital personnel operating. So you can see here too, kind of like Ben was saying, right? Instead of having a million different versions of spreadsheets on a drive right now in the cloud, instead we can come in here and we can view all these different budgets, we can see the budgeted years. We can
create a new one. So it's very easy to to do that. I'll jump into my 26 budget which is in progress. this dashboard. Um, most of the work is going to be done on this worksheet tab right here, but this dashboard is meant to be a bird's eye view of all of our
funds, right? And we can see different uh different columns showing like our FY projections. Um, we can see FY26 revenues versus expenditures. And up here, this is meant to show you basically how far we can go before we
start hitting the red, right? So, it's meant to be that bird's eye view of your budget as you put it together here in the worksheet. The worksheet replaces the spreadsheets. I'm just going to maximize the view.
So, there's a couple ways we can sort this because right now these are all the line items in the budget. Every single line item in our budgets here, but we can drag and we can group things as a way to see things better, right? So maybe the first thing we want to do is we want to identify revenues versus
expenditures. So now I've grouped all my line items by revenue and expenditures. Still a little chaotic. Maybe we want to also see it by uh by department. So now within my expenditures, I can break it out by our different
departments here in the town. already very useful, but maybe I want to take it one step further and I want to break it out by object. Right? So now if we look at the police department, maybe personnel is something that we're not going to be concerned about. That's something that the department heads
handle. Um so we don't need to see those line items, but we do want to see the operating expenses. So here we can view those operating expenses. This is where you as a committee could also start to ask questions if you want. So you could add a comment. This would go directly to the
department head. They would get an email letting him know, hey, question has been posed on this. I won't do it because this is a actually no, this is my demo account. It's going to be named, datestamped, and then whatever's posed is there. The
benefit of this is it's going to reduce the emails, the back and forth, right? Everyone's going to be able to see this. You can also add attachments, too. If you need to add a receipt, um you can mark things as onetime cost. Those projections, we can lock them, too. So, if you'd like to have your department
heads enter in projections, you can do that. And then, uh if I scroll to the right here, we can see our different budget versions, right? So, we have our FY24 budget with all these figures for these line items. Our FY25.
Scrolling over here, we have our projected numbers, right? So this is where department heads could enter in their projections. Here we have our in progress column. This is where department heads and staff could enter in their in progress numbers. And then this just shows you if there's
any comments, attachments, notes. Um you can of course see past budget versions too. Every past historical budget version is available for you to bring up and compare. So the idea is and we also give these charts and graphs.
The idea here is maybe the um I don't want to speak for our departments but but maybe our uh maybe Angela's not as finance savvy as you guys are, right? So giving this visualization to her, being able to click on a line item and being able to see what is that what has that
total been historically this is going to call out to her and to other department heads. Hey, we've been overbudget historically. We've been underbudget. It's going to call out better allocation of these funds and it's going to keep everyone in the loop more as this budget
is being put together. I'm throwing a lot at you guys and it's also late and I'm a bit tired. So, uh, is this making sense so far? Any questions? Is this helpful, Nathan? Yeah. Do do I understand correctly? You know, you have a big like database here and I looked at the beginning where
where you put in like account type department object. you're able to like ch like like dynamically rearrange how all that information is nested. Correct. Correct. So maybe I don't care about department. Um maybe I just want to look at fund. Oh, sorry. I went back
too fast on the mouse. Um so revenue and expenditures and then maybe I just want to view it by fund. So now we have general fund community development. Under revenue, we've got ARPA money, confiscated assets.
But yeah, you can dynamically cut this up however you want. So the idea is, especially for department heads, um, and you can give them access to just their portion of the budget. So they're not going to be able to change numbers for another team. Um, but the idea is for them, maybe you just want to show them
their department and expenditures and then you want them to start entering those numbers. You can do that and you can maximize the view. We can also create a more uniform process by um having a request window. So, we've done
this on the capital side, which is where we've we've given a range of time for department heads to submit these requests because it's not conducive to a a budget process to be getting capital requests at the 10th hour, right? Um, we need these to come in in a timely
manner. So, the system will lock people out after that. It will also remind them to hurry up and get their budget requests in. Can also send out a unified message too with budget instructions. That's another benefit with this. it'll be done right through uh through
the platform. Are you able to give an example of how we might review like um you know which which budget lines have increased by like the greatest percentage from one year to another? Like
is that something that that that you can do? Is that something you have the information in your um on your um what do you call it? Uh sandbox account. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so sorry I'm moving the zoom window a bunch in case you guys are wondering why I'm moving my
mouse around up here so often. Um, so here we have expenditures. We can see all of them. We can um filter everything. You can pin, you can filter, um, you can sort. So if you want to see most expensive to least, you can do so.
Uh, for example, value. But like specifically the change from one year to another that is something we can do. I don't know if I have that in my um sandbox here but that is something where between one year to the next the system can
filter out and identify changes. So basically are things going up? So if we know we're just going to carry forward the um last year's request it's the same amounts you can approve those with a couple clicks and then you can focus on just the rising line item costs.
Um, can we add columns with like like custom like formula? Is that something we would have to like open a ticket and have somebody on like the back end do? What kind of formulas? I guess I haven't heard that before. Oh, I'm I'm just thinking about like the way I would start like playing around with this in like a spreadsheet if if I
wanted to see, you know, what's the proportion of this compared to this other thing. Um, you know, if I was looking for like the percentage change of year, you know, if I had a spreadsheet up, I could just type that up in in a second and have it. Um, I'm just wondering like what like the
flexibility of this is like. I completely understand and I I recognize wholeheartedly that finance people love Excel, so I get it. Um, we have a report builder built into this module. So, if you do want to run Excel reports like summary, expenditures by
department, um, expense objects, revenue, you can certainly come in here and do that, and all of these will export out. And you can group them just like you saw me doing before. You can group them however you want. And this all exports out to Excel or CSV. And the formatting is
really good, I have to say. Michael, how does this interface with a town's finance finance system? Yeah. So, Cleargov works as a complement to ERP systems. Yeah. A big benefit to Cleargov is we are ERP
agnostic. Um, for those of you that aren't familiar, is everyone familiar with an ERP? I have a really simple analogy I can give as it relates to budgeting. Um, ERPs are enterprise enterprise resource planning uh tools. basically um Tyler Munis is what the
town uses if I'm not mistaken. Um they are not really they have budgeting modules in them but they are uh they are not truly designed for that. Um where clear gov really shines is that this is a budgeting software that's built to complement Munis. Um everything is
import export. That's how we operate and we've already mapped all of the data for Maynard. You guys have been uh the town's been a customer for years. uh actually I think since we started um because we're based out of the mill uh but all of the data is in the system um so you guys don't have to worry about
that and then once the budget's been built you can export to Munis and upload it with a few clicks and just for more context when I first joined the company we were a very small startup um I think I was
like employee 16 or 20 or something we're now the leading local government budgeting solution in the nation with over,400 customers and a team of over 200 people and continuing to grow. So, it's there's a lot to this.
And so, typically that would be someone like Greg, our town administrator, or the town accountant who would do that um uploading. Uh, yep. Usually, it's someone on the finance team. It's not always like the finance director. It's usually okay.
Subordinate. But we've already done that. So there's no work to be done for Maynard. Um the data is in there. The account IDs are in there. Um you can upload new data yourself too. So we do have the ability to um uh add in your financial information self-s served, but
you can also just send it to us and we'll get it in the system. But Maynard's mapped. Um yeah, you guys have been a customer for a while, so everything's in there. Uh where does something live? Like uh Kevin Peterson mentioned that there's
like a new firefighters contract. Um and let's say that goes out for like three years and then we have to have a new one. Like where where does information about that live? Is that part of the um is that part of like personnel budgeting that we are not subscribed to or is that
part of the this operational report? So it it can be a variety of things. uh personnel budgeting is really designed for um having those those scenario planning capabilities much like capital, right? And and for customers with with collective bargaining groups, it's been
very helpful um because at the end of the day, you're sitting down with these unions and they're saying, "Well, we want to do a 3% COLA for this group, you know, for firefighters, but not for captains. Captains are going to get a different cola or a different benefit, right, at a different time in the year. and it's very challenging for finance
staff in Excel to be able to do that math. A lot of the time it's done on the back of the napkin. This system lets you run that scenario. You can make that adjustment. It does all the math for you. You choose the cola, the date, it tweaks everything. You can get all your
benefits, additional pay. Um it integrates with operational budgeting as well. So if you fund a new position, right, like you fund a vacancy, that will flow into here as well into the operating budget. It's it's um
there's quite a bit. Uh did that speak to your question though? Yeah. So um do I understand correctly that the town is not using is not doing that in uh clear gov yet? Correct. Personnel budgeting is not something that the town is using. Um if
I go back to my dashboard, I'm sorry I'm logged in as my demo account. Um right now the town is using three modules. operational capital transparency. If you go to our website too, sorry the
zoom controls are in my way. There we go. Uh we have everything broken out. So like planning and tracking, is that what you need help with? Like strategic planning or capital project tracking? Do you need help building your budget?
Do you need help reporting? Do you need help engaging with customer uh with your residents? So, these are all the different solutions we have. Um we work with a ton in Mass in Massachusetts too. A lot of neighbors um the schools use this as
well, but we have case studies on everything. So, if you guys want to read about how other teams have found use um with these tools, you can certainly do so. Um yeah, and you can even sort by the
specific modules. So, but we only work with local governments and schools. That is our focus. This is not built for the private sector. This is built for local government staff and and school officials building budgets.
Any other questions? or I could share some information uh as well after the call today or um we have like videos too that kind of summarize each module. You can view those um uh right online if you go to the
resource center and then videos. Yep. So, I definitely encourage you uh encourage you all if if you want to learn more about these and and think about this for the town. I'm not not trying to sell anything here, but just
showing you where you can go to make your own decisions and your own conclusions. Um happy to speak to questions, though. But but yeah, sorry, I know I keep asking questions, but um it it's I I I see how uh capital planning is using it and different
departments are submitting their requests. Um how how much engagement is like the most of the how much is like Greg using this to plan budget? Um how much is the select board using this? Like what's the engagement townwide?
Uh, candidly, I I don't have 100% um insight into that, but I but I can say that um I I know that Greg uses this. I'm not sure if the select board uses this. And I I guess a a case I would make to the
finance committee is to um please en encourage more use of this because we're paying for this as a town, right? The operating budget and and we want to have more staff and eyes on this, right? it it shouldn't be siloed this work to just one one person or one team. I think it's
important for us to collaborate and to be kind of checking and balancing one another. Um so yeah, Nathan, I'm I'm not exactly sure uh who's who's working and and putting these budgets together outside of the capital, which is what I've really been focused on. Um but
yeah, please please ask those questions uh to the select board and to Greg. Um, I think it's very powerful what what uh Ben was saying about how we can't seem to present these these issues to the powers that be and we're facing a half a
billion dollars in capital and we don't have the money. Um, it it's as a resident stepping back from the committees pretty scary. Um, pretty scary and I it's almost blindsiding too and I'm involved in this
so Anything else? I'm happy to show more or um hopefully this was helpful. Hopefully you guys are coming away from this feeling like you're not overwhelmed and that you understand how this tool works and the benefits to the town.
Awesome. Thank you for the head nods. Um, hopefully this is something you'd like to get into because again, there's no additional there's no cost to get the fincom in here and to get you guys trained and using this. And I would I would love to see um I would love to see
you guys create your own budget versions to go up against uh Greg and and and the other budgets that are put together, right? Because maybe you have some more creative thinking um and that deserves to be heard. So,
all right. Thank you so much. Really interesting. Yeah, I think in the past this is something we haven't tried yet. Um, because I thought that this was something where we didn't have we had a certain number of paid licenses, so there just wasn't bandwidth for us to be
able to do this. Um, but maybe I'll circle back with Greg and talk to him and see if that's still the case. Yeah, unlimited licenses. Um, again, it's an investment that communities make into these tools. We want we want that investment. We want you guys to find
value in that. So, happy to get you in here. All right. If you think of more questions, Nathan, you can set up a a one-on-one with Mike at some future date. I don't want to be here all night talking about Clear Gov. Yeah. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for uh and
thanks everyone for the Yeah, bearing with my questions. Yeah, happy to meet with anyone additionally later, too. Nathan, if you have more, I'm happy to meet with you. I think you're my neighbor, too. So, just let me know. All right. I think that's everything I
had for capital planning. You have some more income stuff to run, Jill? I we do. Uh, I'm not sure if you all are interested in the spreadsheets for future planning for sort of the general fund budget that Nathan's been working
on. Um, or if you all are are ready to sign off for the night for the capital projects, we do still have some um, fin topics after, too. But if the if the planning tool that we've been working on or the spreadsheet that uh Nathan's been working on is of
interest to the capital committee, that's something that we're starting to mo model in some of these potential capital debt overrides. Um yeah, show me where it's posted. We'll look it over. Sure. Um so I think it should be on
board docs and I don't know, Nathan, if you want to give like a general overview. I know we're getting a little bit late tonight. Yeah, I have to jump, but I I just want to say quickly thanks thank you to everyone and and please feel free to reach out if you'd like to uh go over
any other questions. Happy to help. Um yeah, have a good night everyone. Sorry, I have to go. Thanks so much, Mike. Thank you. And sort of as as Nathan's pulling that up to sort of give you an overview there, um I did also want to ask Doug
before you jump off if you could maybe transfer host to me or make me a co-host. I'm a little bit worried when you sign off the whole meeting will shut down. Yeah, I'll do that. Thanks. You need me to pull up the spreadsheet,
Nathan, or Oh, cool. I I have it here. So, this is the most recent version. Um, I got the uh I last week Kevin Pearson sent the like the line level detail. So, I was able to update everything in FY26
uh over the weekend. Um, and I mean honestly I I I wrote down like a lot of a lot of uh what I noted as like large increases or decreases. Um, but he kind of answered all of those uh with you
know what he was talking about the end of the year transfers earlier. Those largely map onto how we budgeted for FY26. So I'm not sure I have any additional questions there. I mean, things that I I would point out are um the town admin salary went up pretty
significantly, 27%. The uh summer street facility expenses were like have we budgeted 50,000, now they're 21,000. Um you know, the uh salary changes at the with the fire
department up 23% that was like $300,000. Um but uh yeah that's all all here. So you know oops police salary superior you know is is up
um 29.7% but the offers officer salaries are down 9%. Just a lot of detail. I haven't really done any any uh analysis of this. It's just it's here now and I I noted a few things in my notebook. Um, I don't know
if anybody has any particular questions. I We've all looked at this and this is just a more updated version of the same document right now. Nathan, what will happen now that we Well, we didn't approve, but you know, Kevin is
changing the F now the FY25 budget by close to a million. So does that get reflected here or what do we do when once that's approved or how does that work? I guess I guess we um we don't really
update it. Uh we don't update it. Okay. I did this at the beginning or I did FY25 kind of at the same point last year and I think everything before that was based on Yeah. town meeting or whatever. Yep. Yeah.
Okay. Honestly, that'd be kind of like a whole separate pro. You know, you kind of want to be consistent from year to year like whether you're pulling numbers from the beginning or the end. Um Yeah. And because so much of what of those year-end transfers are already accounted for in changes in
the FY26 budget, I think it's okay. Yep. Yep. Okay. Yep. But when we do plus and minus from 25 to 26, it's in the 26 budget, but we might see Well, we just have to know, right, that these things changed.
Yep. Yeah, I mean one one thing that seems interesting about clear gov to me is if these if you can have like comments and you know the types of things that like Kevin was you know he had like a little line on each of the spreadsheet explaining like why there was a variance
in the account if that's the sort of thing that would live in clear gov. Um I like the idea that those sort of notes would be available for anyone who wanted to look at it. I don't know how much it would mess up your spreadsheet, but you can also add comments in in individual cells.
Yeah, I've done that in a couple places, but it's really hard to see. Yeah. Yeah, because usually hidden like inside department somewhere and Yeah. Okay. Well, I also shared this um with
Doug. If you if you if it's of interest to your committee, you can circulate it. It's also on board docs. So, this is something where we're sort of going through each line items and looking for the trends and changes between the different fiscal years to try to track things. But, you know, as you're aware, it does get tricky because, you know,
there's end of year transfers that will slightly change those numbers. Um, and also some some budgets have or just line items have changed to be in different places. Um, and we've tried to keep a track of that in the past, you know, where certain responsibilities
were shifted from the schools to DPW or vice versa for like care of grounds and things like that. So, it looks like there's big changes or percentages in the budgets and we try to call that out where we where uh where it's more than a couple percent.
But I think the most useful for me, one of the most useful things of your tool is that there's sort of that debt ratio where we can start to look at if we do an override um what that looks like um in terms of the debt ratio. So I think I think we've talked in the past we want
to keep that at 10%, less than 10%, something like that. Um, and we're getting kind of close to that or maybe even less than 10% is ideal. So, I mean, if we do a DPW garage and it's 67 million, I don't know what the interest rate is, but let's say it's
three and a half% over 30 years. Um, it would make our uh our debt service percentage go from, you know, keeping shy of 10%. Actually, now 9.38 is the closest we'd get. Um
it may go up 14.8%. In uh next year Yeah. So it's it's a pretty useful tool. you can start to put some of the numbers in at the bottom and get an idea of how that might be spread out assuming the um
the different terms in there like have been hot linked. So yeah, and there's also a bit here where we can play with all the salaries at once. It'd be nice to have that by department. I'd like to have a lot more information on, you know, which contracts are going to be set set for
how many years. Um but right now, you know, you can just say let's everybody's going to get a 3% uh salary increase in the town. If you if you do that, it automatically adjusts all the salary lines up above um and shows like the new
total expenses for the next year because that's all that's all stored here. applies that 3% that 3% gets drawn from the bottom and then affects FY27. Anyway, have um are there any other
questions or comments or thoughts about this? All right, I'm going to uh stop sharing. Thanks for indulging me there. Excellent. Thanks. Uh so I think that's all all the feature
planning and and capital topics that I had. So I don't know if Doug or anyone else uh on either committee wanted to bring up any additional topics tonight. We covered everything. Okay. All right. If that's the case, uh I
think we might go on to a couple of finance committee topics and hopefully we'll wrap the meeting up soon. So, uh I see you transferred to co-host to me. So, thanks for that. Um hopefully you're welcome to stay. Uh if you'd like to jump off, uh hopefully it won't end
the call. Uh I'll just send you a frantic text message. All right. Um so we're going to go on to the next topic. So um we only have one additional topic and then routine agenda. So uh the next topic is for planning for the special town meeting.
So that's going to be from my understanding October 27th. Um, and I did get a let's see I did get a outline here of this. Um, so
why why am I bringing something up that is in October? Because um the articles will actually be due August 11th which is very soon uh if we go by this timeline. So um so this is currently a placeholder for the
deadlines. Uh, so this is the last update I had from Greg is that they'll be due in August. Um, so this is for placeholder articles. Um, but then at the end of August is when supposedly is deadline for the actual articles
themselves. So um, so within the next month, these articles should start coming in. Generally speaking, there are usually less articles at a special town meeting than at the annual town meeting. So hopefully it won't take too night. Um but this is
sort of a general overview of the flow. So our recommendations would be due um in midepptember. Um and then we would be having the act for the printing like to make it on to printing
but we might be able to fudge that a little bit. And usually we have our finance committee hearing one week ahead of the special town meeting. So it would be on October 20th. um if the meeting's on the 27th. Um
and I didn't get a chance to watch the select board. So, supposedly at one of their last meetings, they voted to have it on the 27th. Um but I haven't had a chance yet to watch that on YouTube. So, far as I know, this is the current timeline. and um Greg and Dick said they would get
us drafts as soon as they got drafts um potentially even before the select board accepts them into the the warrant. Um so we can hopefully have additional time to due diligence on them. So the only downside to that would be is we might potentially get draft articles that
don't actually end up being on the special town meeting um if they get deferred or um otherwise cancelled. But I I haven't had I I don't think there's been many cases of that in the
past. Um so I don't think it's too big of a risk. I think it's better to get something earlier than late. Personally, do you have any questions, comments, or further discussion on the special town meeting?
No. All right. I'm not hearing any. Um so in that case, um we would be going on to the routine agenda. So we would be voting in our prior meeting minutes. So let's see. I have meeting minutes
here from June 23rd. But I don't believe we voted in yet. Can you see that? Okay. So, this was a pretty brief meeting. We were just talking about planning for our first fiscal year meeting. Um, and we
had some updates Do we have any edits or suggestions for these draft meeting minutes for June 23rd? Uh, I move to approve the June 23rd meeting minutes as as written. I'll second.
All right. Right. So, we have Nathan uh and Male as a first and a second on that. Do we have any further discussion discussion or comments? No. All right. So, I'll take a roll call vote to accept the meeting minutes of June 23rd as written. Uh, Linda,
yes. Nathan, yes. Male, yes. Peter, yes. Katie. Um I'll abstain as I was not there.
Okay. Uh Nathaniel. Yes. Uh I am also a yes. Um so we have one obstain and the rest are yeses. I believe that was the only meeting draft that I had to vote in tonight.
Yep. Um, so now we're on to uh updates from chairs and members. Um, so I can I I'll start with the updates then. So, um, I did want to give everyone an update. I think I circulated this information. So in case there are
any questions or concerns that um citizens watching may have there there is two public forums coming up on the Maynard power choice option. So that's where our town is um offering this um optional way to buy into this electric
program that the town will be running. So there'll be an open hearing at um July 24th at 7 p.m. in the public library uh and on Zoom. Uh, and there'll also be another one on um Tuesday, July 29th at 1 PM at the senior center. Um,
so just to sort of get word out there that that will be happening. Uh, and if there's questions about that, this is two potential forums for citizens to learn more about it. Um, I also have an update that's already
been talked about in the meeting before is that we do expect to receive a state grant for the $2.1 million for water treatment. Um, so we did touch on that before in the meeting. Um, and I think those were my two main updates from myself. Do any other
members have updates you'd like to share with the committee? Uh, yeah. Um, Ben actually mentioned this. There's a uh there's a roadway safety committee that's in the process of being formed. Um and I've kind of volunteered to be the liaison from
Fincom uh since they will not accept me as a voting member due to the town charter. Yep. And that's the only thing I wanted to say about that is that we can't vote on any other committee. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, they, uh, they had a
meeting that I, they had a little Zoom meeting with the Office of Grants and Research, uh, on Friday that I watched talking about some like the the grants that managers already applying for and other ones that we might be able to next year. Um, so I will let you know more
when there's more information. Um, I guess this isn't really an update for mine since I know you already sent this around earlier, Jill, sort of in advance of the meeting and stuff, but I guess I just maybe could re-emphasize for folks the um EDC's memo that they sent around. They're looking for
volunteers for their to help with their like marketing plan of Mayard essentially. So, just thought I'd mention that to folks, you know, it was already sent around and stuff. Yes, thanks for mentioning that. Um, I forgot to mention it. So, thanks for mentioning it verbally. Um, but yeah,
the the memo should also be posted on the website. So, uh, if anyone is interested in that, sort of a similar uh, spiel there is that we are not allowed to be voting members um, on any other committee. Um, but liaison or otherwise are acceptable.
Okay. Any additional updates or discussion from members on topics? All right. I am not hearing any. So, um the next thing to talk about is planning for our next meeting.
Um, so I would potentially propose if we would like to keep it, um, we can have, we usually meet on the second and fourth Monday of the month. Um, so that would actually be next Monday, the 28th. Um, we met this one, we met on this Monday
because Dick was unable to meet on the 14th. Um, or whatever last Monday was. So that's sort of why we're a little bit changed in the schedule. Um, would people be open to meeting on the 28th? Uh, I think for me the only main topic
or the main focus of that meeting would just be the the reserve the um budget transfers. Uh, I'm not aware that there are any reserve fund requests. Um, so for our Oh, and for our meeting minutes for
tonight, the since this is the first meeting of the fiscal year, I think our reserve fund will be reset um to the original amount like in the notes, Linda. Um, as Yeah. And did we do we it reduced it to 225 this year, I think. I'll have to
check the warrant. Yeah, I think you're right, Linda. 200 or 22. I think 225. 225. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Um, yep. So, so there's no reserve fund requests for the prior fiscal year that
I'm aware of. Um, but there's just the the the shifts, the transfers in the budgets. Yep. So, we start, you know, just the new balance. Yep. Yep. So, I would request uh or I would propose that for our next meeting on the
28th, we sort of talk about those budget transfers. um and vote them in if we're comfortable with that. So, if you have any questions or concerns, um let me know. I can also see if Greg and Kevin is available if we want one of them to
be at the actual meeting um for our voting. Um and then I could put a topic on here for discussion of any draft articles we may get because potentially we may get some. I don't think we will um because they're
not potentially due until August 11th, but uh I can put it as a topic just in case because if it's not on there, we can't talk about it. Uh I'm not sure if we'll have any additional fiscal planning or budget forecasting to talk about because I think we did a pretty good job of doing that tonight. Um but I
can put it on there just because if there's any new developments, uh we can't talk about it unless it's on the postage agenda, which I'll probably have to post in the next day or so because it has to be up. um 48 hours ahead of the meeting. So
is it is it necessary as a committee for us to like make a determination regarding clear of adoption or anything like that at some point or is that sort of not the way that that would kind of work? Sorry, I think I missed the question. All I heard was something about adoption
and then my micro my headset cut out. Um, is it is it necessary for us as like a committee to make a decision about like adopting clear gov as like something that we would be sort of using I guess the details are sort of would be tentative at this point, but is that something that we would need to like
have a vote on or anything like that or or not really? Um, that's a good question. I think I have to talk to Greg about it because I'm I'm pretty sure in the past that when we talked to Greg about it, they've sort of said there's limited licenses.
um which didn't really sound like is the case um from Mike tonight. So, I just want to make sure we're on the same wavelength um yeah, I can definitely ask Greg about that. And Jill, my daughter's birthday is the 28th, so depending on how long dinner
and all the things are, I might not make it. Just to throw that out there. But I it sounds like there's enough quorum people to be okay. No worries. Happy birthday. 10.
Oh my goodness. They grow so fast. Um okay. Yeah. So um great. So that would those would be the three topics. So, just the the transfers, the any fiscal planning or
forecasting or future planning or however I'll put it on the agenda, but it'll probably be a light topic. Um, and discussion of any draft articles or planning for the special town meeting if I get any new information. Um, which I don't know if we'll get. And then the
routine agenda. Are there any other bud uh topics for the meeting um next week that you'd like you all would like to add? Nope. I I'm not hearing any. So, um Sorry, Jill. Peter. Um what about some do people want to talk
about the DPW garage? I mean, uh the the price tag in particular. Um so, it might be good to have something on the agenda just if we decide we want to talk about it and there's stuff to say, it's is properly noticed
or you know part of the meeting notice. Sure. So I can add that to um the budget forecasting for upcoming fis fiscal years. I can put a note here saying like uh special topic DPW garage discussion
in very much sort of the same vein. Uh obviously I sort of defer to you guys like you know procedural and stuff but would it be worth sort of having a similar thing if we if we do get info from Greg about the here go like license situation if we want to have that as something potentially but it's not really like time sensitive obviously.
there. Yeah. Sure. So, I'll put special topic potential fincom use of clear go software tool discussion. Is is there a quadboard meeting scheduled that we should start preparing
for? I asked about that um and the last time I asked about it um I was told to sort of pause until um everyone so every single committee my understanding is in July has a nomination of the chairs and
their members uh the uh vice chair and other um roles. So, I'm not entirely sure um if that's been done with the select board yet or not. Uh but the impression I got was that that would not be scheduled until the select board had
the nominations of their various roles. But I can reach out to Greg and see if that's been done yet. Okay. All right. Um Okay. And then if we have our meeting on the
28th, um the next scheduled meeting would be August 11th. So that would be the second Tuesday um of the month. Uh sorry, Tuesday, the second Monday of the month. I know, you know, sometimes people might have holidays coming up in August. So,
um so if we need to wiggle stuff around, I guess just let everyone know. As long as we have a quorum, it's acceptable. So, and then for the DPW, if we want to talk about the potential garage discussion, do we want to just go over what's been presented at the select board meetings
and in other forums, or is that something we have very specific questions that you want me to ask Justin about? Um, no, not yet. I I let's I Okay, I would let the select board take the
lead. I can't believe they think it would pass either, but I just thought it there may be stuff that comes up. Um and I'm curious in feedback from other members. Um you know, what people think of this and
I I think we need to move beyond this fairly quickly so that we're not wasting time on something that I'm not sure can happen. So anyway, um but no, I'm not looking to talk to Justin yet. Okay,
sounds good. All right, so I think if there are no additional topics for discussion tonight, um Nope. All right, I'm not hearing any. Um, I would move that we adjourn the meeting
at 9:36 p.m. I'll second. All right, we got a move. We got a second. Do we have any further discussion tonight? No. All right, so I'll take a roll call vote to adjurnn. Linda, yes. Nathan,
yes. Male, yes. Peter, yes. Katie, yes. Nathaniel. Yes.
Right. I am also a yes. So we are adjourned.