00:01:53,100	S1:
I.

00:07:56,400	S1:
The other.

00:08:51,667	S2:
Peter. Gary.

00:08:53,367	S3:
Ready to rock in the morning for live test.

00:08:57,367	S4:
Test.

00:08:58,467	S5:
Everyone. Yeah, me. All right.

00:08:59,501	S3:
Yep.

00:09:00,868	S5:
All right. Good morning everybody. Good morning. So I think if everyone's good we'll probably get. We'll get going here. So this everyone's here today to go over the FY 2027 budget. So as you know the last 4 or 5 years anyways, we've tried to come together on the first Saturday of December and provide the both the Select Board and Finance Committee an overview of the budget. Um, and behind you, uh, as you know, also traditional in past years or all the department heads here to answer any questions that pertain directly to operation or financial needs.

00:09:50,000	S5:
I want to change.

00:09:50,701	S3:
You guys can't escape. So you really look at your craft in that group. We're lucky. We're arrogant. Jeff. Jeff's cornered.

00:10:01,467	S5:
All right, so first is. This is something.

00:10:05,801	S3:
We have.

00:10:06,067	S5:
To open up our.

00:10:07,267	S3:
Committees.

00:10:08,501	S5:
What do you want? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good. Good point. Fin. No, actually it's not. Let's not bother.

00:10:14,667	S6:
Let's do this.

00:10:16,667	S3:
You want to start? Go ahead. Okay. Um, so I will open up the.

00:10:23,701	S3:
Meeting of the one Select Board of December 6th at 8:40 a.m.. Present for the select board are Deirdre Peretti, Gary Cheeseman, Peter Clay, and Ben Hyman.

00:10:35,167	S7:
Second.

00:10:36,868	S3:
Uh, Gary will vote yes. Peter. Yes. Deirdre. Yes. And Ben is. Yes. Cheers.

00:10:50,200	S5:
This is the chair of the Finance Advisory Committee. Opening the the meeting here, as you said, at, uh, it's like 840. Uh, president, I've got four out of the four members of the committee. I know that we need to vote, but there you go. We're open. Great. Thank you. All right. So the first slide before we get into the finances is something that, you know, I think every municipality, at least in the Commonwealth, struggles to do or, you know, or struggles to do well. And I'm not sure what, you know, what what the solution is, but to, to illustrate, you know, kind of what we do and what, you know, where the, where the money goes in, you know, part of part of that difficulty is that, you know, we're of the town of Wenham, and any municipality for that matter is a community and not every service touches every resident equally. So, you know, there's a lot of services on this list that you may have never, you know, touched since you've, you know, moved to town. But to know that, you know, you're part of a community and that every one of these services does directly touch your fellow, your fellow residents, um, you know, an education is, you know, probably the biggest example of that. You know, a lot of folks maybe at one time had children in the school district or in no longer do or have moved to one of them, you know, after their kids have grown up or didn't have any kids or, you know, whatever circumstances they're in, you know, education probably represents 50 plus percent, you know, maybe even approaching 60% now, we'll probably find that out in a little bit. But, you know, and then so you're paying half of your tax bill goes to educating the kids of the community. And it's a service that, you know, your family might not be directly receiving. And that same theme holds true for all of the other things. So, you know, we've in past years and it's been streamlined and we're kind of moving that information more into, um, uh, documents that are, are being published through time being built. The, um, the, the when and wire, which, which is a newsletter. Um, we're working on a styled budget which will incorporate more metrics into it. Uh, we're also including some of the metrics now into our annual, uh, annual town report. So, you know, that's a way to try to get the message out to the community. Like what actually, each one of these departments does and, you know, kind of try to tie some numbers to it as far as you know, even though you've never called 911. Um, you know, but there's thousands of 911 responses in Windham, Windham every year. So, you know, in those was just just trying to illustrate that. Um, so that's really all on that. So with that, uh, I don't know if anyone has any comments or anything before we jump into the more of the finance specific information.

00:13:53,167	S8:
All right. Let's go.

00:14:00,868	S5:
First, I just want to provide a quick overview for the folks that are not aware of or looking in this room. I think most folks understand that our our on the revenue side of the equation, um, it were largely made up of, uh, our tax levy. So that's money that's raised through your property tax bill that you receive as a resident every quarter where, you know, 85, 86% of, um, our revenue is supported by your, your tax bill. And then beyond that, we really have two other prime components. You have state aid, which is in this in this specific example stated as unrestricted government aid that comes out of the state. So that's aid that comes directly to the municipality. We have another piece of aid that goes chapter 70 funding. That goes because we are a regional district that goes directly to the Hamilton, Hamilton, Wenham Regional District and is restricted only for educational purposes. And that that holds true across all communities. But in some communities that don't have a regional district, you'd see that revenue source reflected in its entirety here. But for this case, we just, you know, we're at 2%. You can see the state, although they have slightly increased state aid over the last ten years, it actually falls as a percentage of budget because the budget, even though restricted at 2.5% plus new growth. So three, 3.5% growth. Um, the state aid, uh, their increases have not kept up with that increase. Therefore reducing it as a percentage of total budget. And, um, looking at local receipts would be things like excise tax. Um, if you take a building permit out, conservation planning, all those permitting fees that go into, um, that you pay to have the permit done is, is all part of that local receipts. Uh. What's that? Yeah. Licenses. So really, you know, any any fees you pay parking passes for Pleasant Pond things, things like that. So right down, right down to, you know, any money outside of taxes that you're paying to the town is captured in that local receipts bar. And you can see here on the right the chart that shows that we are, you know, not alone in our peer communities here up on the North Shore and really anywhere in the Commonwealth, you would see a chart that reflected us similarly in that mid 80%. Um, you know, something to keep in mind is that if you were to expand that view out and look at the larger communities and certainly the, you know, the gateway type communities, the larger cities, the it's actually closer to the inverse of this, of this picture here, where unofficial state aid would would reflect probably 50 to 70% of their budgets, uh, with tax, with their with their taxation coming in as more of a second secondary component.

00:17:27,701	S5:
So I mean, our annual collection rate really, by any metric is is very good. So, you know, this this helps the community for a couple different reasons. One. Creditors see communities as um, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a very well. Most of them, particularly the smaller communities with high reliance on a tax levy like we have. We are here as a very safe investment. So generally, you'll see that we have a lot of Triple-A rated communities in Massachusetts for, you know, for a lot of the reasons is that, you know, the money is, you know, I don't want to all but guaranteed because the collection rates tend to be very high. Um, municipalities have, um, you know, very little these types of municipalities have very little reliance on, uh, revenue sources outside of the tax levy. So meaning that local receipts and free cash, which, excuse me, local receipts and state aid, which are much more turbulent in the times of economic downturns. You know, we have little reliance on those given our budget is primarily, um, tax, the tax levy. So. And then this just further compounded that showing that, you know, we have a very reliable revenue source and a very high collection rate.

00:18:55,667	S5:
And so for free cash, you know, I think everyone has a pretty good understanding of this. But for the folks at home that that are watching is, you know, it's really I think when you talk to like the S&P, you know, they'll they'll always jokingly say on the call, we have Massachusetts and then you have everybody else. So Massachusetts requires us to account for our, our our use and accounting method. That's slightly different from the rest of the country. And so we're kind of forced to do both. And, um, you know, our audit is one accounting practice. And then our door, the Department of Revenue submissions are another accounting practice. So when they look at us, they look at undesignated fund balance, which is probably a more familiar term to folks here and at home that, you know, work in the finance world, but it's essentially undesignated fund balance is primarily, uh, is primarily made up. When we're looking here tonight of two components, the free cash in your, um, undesignated stabilization fund. So free cash here is we have a draft policy that hopefully will be finalized this year, but currently states 4 to 6%. This is a, you know, pretty widely adopted spread across most communities in the Commonwealth and is a recommendation, um, by the Department of Revenue and is also a, um, you know, really derived from the undesignated fund balance recommendations that come from the GFA, uh, finance, which is the institutional, uh, municipal finance, International Municipal Finance Association and their best practices. So, you know, you can see that it kind of ebbs and flows in the years we did recently go through a few years where we've spiked up over that draft, um, policy. The policy was, you know, has just started being circulated in the last few years. So there really wasn't a policy prior to that. But, you know, we've we've taken direct action to try to bring it down into the 6%, 6%, 4 to 6% range. Um, you know what you do, what you don't want to do and what a trap that a lot of communities and, you know, even the school district did not. Not saying that in a negative way, but you can see when you fall into the trap of when you. You'll see some communities will. They'll have a high level of free cash, and they will start off setting the reoccurring, reoccurring expenditures with free cash injections into the budget each year. And then when those one time funds a free cash start to start to dry up or fall down into their into their stated range, they, you know, you realize that, well, you know, that hole has to be filled with something and now you don't have the reoccurring revenue. So what we've done is we have kind of hit it by, well, really buy by three, kind of buy by 3 to 3 prong approach. We've you know, we've ratcheted tightened up on expenditures over the last three years or so. We've um, you know, we've we've kind of reworked our revenue expenditure, revenue assumptions so that now you're kind of raising your revenue assumptions a little bit. You're reducing your expenditures a little bit. And then we're also taking chunks. We, we, we instituted, I think three years ago as well, or two years ago, a, um, a standing budget item that a that funds a stabilization. And then we've also been making additional contributions into our stabilization fund. So we're kind of bringing it down that way. We're continuing with, you know, with that methodology, as you'll see later with this budget and, you know, in anticipation, anticipating, bringing it right down, you know, into the sweet spot between 4 and 6% next year.

00:22:59,367	S5:
So here's the other part of that equation. The undesignated fund balance I stated earlier is a stabilization stabilization fund and reserves. So again, component, you know, is basically stabilization, stabilization, undesignated fund balance that is out of the way is, you know, anywhere from, you know, 14 to 25% of your annual expenditures, which, you know, you have to take a every community, a different approach when looking at their recommendations, because their recommendations apply to the entire country as best practices. But, you know, we're a community in Massachusetts, particularly, that has a high reliance on a very stable revenue source of of tax. Italian tax levy. When you leave Massachusetts, um, you'll see, uh, the, you know, the community, the, the municipalities work more closely with a their, their county government and they also run more enterprise type operations. So usually you'll see the governments will be larger, but they're running you know, it kind of more like a business in some extent. So when you're doing that, the reserves become a high. Working towards the higher end of that recommendation, recommended range becomes, you know, probably more important because your revenue sources are are going to have a lot large swings depending on what's going on in the economy at any given time. So you can see we've worked very hard and quickly over the last few years because our, you know, our stabilization fund, if you looked at a similar, similar, um, cohort to communities as the slide, a couple slides before when we were looking at revenue sources, we were, you know, most of them are in this 5 to 9, 5 to 10% range. And we were, you know, we were down in the two, 2 to 3% range for for a while. So you know, we identified that as you know, our, our, our stabilization fund was low. So we've worked to bring that up and actually are intentionally exceeding our. This was intentional to exceed our, you know, our draft policy statement of targeting 5 to 7% in anticipation of the new tax, the new trash contract that will have to be, um, acted on this year. It'll have to be effective July 1st. And we're anticipating, you know, back a number of years ago coming. You know, it feels like it's been forever. But coming out of Covid, the trash, as long as the rest of the economy was, you know, there were a lot of unknowns and supply chains and logistical problems in the, you know, trash and trash disposal business was certainly included in that. And some of the community, we're all coming off all these communities, which are none of the trash vendors, will entertain these contracts. But prior to this round of contracting, um, pretty much every community was in a ten year Contract. So you're basically the the vendors were trying to forecast out costs ten years in advance, and it didn't work out very well for them. And so you'll you'll see a lot of communities in Massachusetts now that they're renegotiating. And back then, you know, we were getting told by Casella to plan for a 60 to 80% increase. And really back then there were communities like Marblehead, for example. And while I was working there, we were in that 60 to 80% in our in our contract renewal. So that's kind of what we were planning for. It has come in luckily less than that. We're looking at probably about 20% in the first year, which is still, you know, a lot. It's far outside our ability to, you know, to raise within given our revenue restrictions. But we have planned for it. And, you know, we think we have a funding plan that will intentionally draw down our stabilization funds over a number of over a number of years to allow us to step in to that increase.

00:27:22,868	S5:
And these are these are our unfunded liabilities. Um.

00:27:30,100	S5:
I always struggle with the best way to explain these, but basically every day the town exists and continues to operate. You are you're effectively making a, you know, a guarantee or to your employees that in the future, you know, they will have a certain retirement benefit. Uh, as, you know, as, as in a way of income, which is your pensions and retirement. And then you also have some sort of medical coverage, which would be the other employee benefits. So these create a when looking forward a liability on the town because there you are essentially making a promise to pay in the future today um something in that something is then quantified here. And you can see on the screen here that they are some pretty big numbers. Uh, with the pension in, in retirement side of things, the employees, this has gone through a number of, um, changes over the last 40 or 50 years where, you know, the municipal worker 50, 50 years ago had, you know, virtually no contribution to their pension. And it was totally, um, supported by the communities. And now you have in to to today and it's everything in between. But now, today, it's basically about 11% every, every full time municipal worker contributes about between. It's kind of a sliding scale, but between about ten and 12%, ten, 11% of their every paycheck goes to, um, the Essex County Retirement Board. So that is offsetting the liability. But there is still an existed liability based on actuarial studies. Some will argue that that employees now are effectively self-funding. And, you know, this liability exists because of existing promises that were made prior to the most recent round of um, adjustments made by Deval Patrick made his, um, employee pension reform, uh, which is the most recent, I can't remember how many years ago that was maybe 10 or 12. And, um, so it really depends on what you look at it with that. And but state law requires the, the, the liability to be fully funded by 20. Is it 37. Joe.

00:30:05,000	S9:
Well it's 2035 is Essex Street region.

00:30:06,968	S5:
As it gets a 2035 is Essex Regional. So we're on basically a payment plan, kind of like a mortgage, kind of like a mortgage that's just kind of hammered out, what are you going to get two by 2035? And then that's what makes up our pension assessment. So this is a pretty big spend every year. But to remember that it's only temporary in the in the fact that it will be fully funded in 2035. Yep.

00:30:33,567	S3:
Um, question on the Pep. Can you hear me? Right. Is it working? Yeah. Oh, so it says.

00:30:41,667	S10:
Once the pension is fully funded.

00:30:43,968	S3:
Uh, appropriate.

00:30:44,667	S10:
To the trust fund amount equivalent to the former pension funding payment question. Is this currently under the the pension uh, 2035 catch up program to fully fund approximately 80 to 90% of the money that's paid in every year is to reduce the unfunded liability. So my question is, is under the draft policy. Are we agreeing to the actuarial amount per employee? Or are we also agreeing to some catch up.

00:31:22,100	S3:
Which is.

00:31:23,067	S10:
In other words, are we agreeing to 10% of. Or are we agreeing to 80% on this formula. Because it's a huge difference of the.

00:31:32,467	S5:
So you're talking about 2020% or 80% of the the total spend that we're putting into the pension rate.

00:31:38,667	S10:
Well, it says under PEB, I guess we're we're drafting a policy that says we're going to once we fully fund the plan in 2035, which of which currently 80% is catch up payments. It's not actual actuarial employee payments. Are we saying we're going to do a similar annual payment, including as if we were underfunded and funding 80%, or are we funding the actuarial liability for the employees?

00:32:06,267	S5:
I think the the plan is to look at that when we we get there. I don't think we're actually promising exact dollar amount, but the idea is that right now we have, you know, 1 million or 1 million to spend that's going to the pension in retirement that in theory, by 2035 will be, as you said, caught up with the liability. And then with the the discount rate that will be, you know, again, in theory self-supporting. And we can then look to defer. You know, is it 100% or 10% of that to open just because we're going to be in a similar scenario. And we're anticipating legislation that, just like it forced the communities to catch up to the with the retirement payments, they're probably going to do something you're going to see when everybody when these funding schedules are completed, we're at 2035. But I think the law is 37 or 39 that you might see something like that for the PEB. So we're just, you know, we're trying to be ahead of it and we're going to know that, you know, we're basically going to be left with, you know, a in the year it gets paid off again. You know, in theory and things can change. But we you know, we had a $1.2 million spend last year. And now this year we'll look we don't have that $1.2 million spend. So what are we going to do with that money. It's like well we have this other liability. So I think you know, the least, the prudent thing where a lot of communities are looking at is we're going to be going to take some summer all or whatever, something in between of that money and start working towards this ope.

00:33:33,601	S10:
Well, I understand that, but I would ask that no draft policy be put down that could perhaps be used in subsequent collective bargaining or or legislation committing us to a catch up fund similar to the 80% that we're legally obligated under the pension plan right now. We certainly we should commit to whatever is actually required per employee, but not a similar catch up which was mandated and is going up 10% a year. So anyway.

00:34:07,367	S9:
Jared and Gary can probably talk to this a little bit more, but I think the policy we're talking about here with OPEC was more of a general policy because maybe six, seven, eight years ago there were no deposits being made to OPEC. They came up with a plan. I think the first year, maybe $40,000 went into OPEC. And the the OPEC plan was every year we would increase that by $10,000. And then in 2035, when we had now $1 million a year available, we would tap into that. Not to not to any specific mechanical actuarial calculation. Just saying, you know, this million dollars is coming out of the budget for for the pension funding. We're going to take some amount of that to put us on a track to fund OPEC.

00:34:47,801	S10:
That's great. But that's not what that says. Okay. So I would beg you please don't. It's the law of unintended consequences here. Okay I understand. I understand what you're trying to do. But though as worded, it's very, in my opinion, not a good idea.

00:35:05,267	S8:
We could, you know, we'll.

00:35:06,467	S5:
Certainly look at that.

00:35:07,367	S8:
I'm sorry. I'll stop on that one. No, no, I just that that is.

00:35:09,767	S5:
I mean, what you're saying is, is fair, inaccurate that that is the but that is the draft policy that has been circulated publicly. It's come out of the Select board. It's sent to the fin com for review. So it's like anything here, it's public information and has been circulated as such that that is the draft policy. But that is exactly it. It is a draft policy in the fin com is reviewing or will be reviewing over the next year to make recommendations back to the select board on what exactly to adopt. So I think all your concerns are valid in heard.

00:35:48,300	S3:
Agenda item.

00:36:04,267	S5:
So basically, like I said earlier, this is, you know, early stages of the budget. But I mean, this this is, you know, we're 90. 90% of we're 90% there. We have some outstanding assumptions that in estimates that we're kind of running on at this stage of the game, we are a bit early, given our, you know, we're budgeting for, um, starting on July 1st and we have, you know, some pretty big, uh, unknowns that we're waiting to hear. Come in. I wanted one of them here. We actually heard of heard from last night, which was the pension assessment actually came in a little bit less than what you see budgeted for here. Uh, we're still waiting on our health insurance. The trash collection is, you know, we're running with 20%. It could be 18. It could be 22. Uh, so, you know, that's in. Um, so those are kind of some, some variables, some, some staffing. There's going to be some dollar amounts that are budgeted for in the presentation that you're going to see tonight, but, you know, might not live in the current budget that, you know, like for example, building maintenance. We're looking at maybe consolidating that into one line item. So you might see some reductions in the department lines, uh, you know, um, in things of that nature, staffing existing in certain departments that might be shifted to another department, that kind of makes a little bit more sense. Um, you know, again, I just think that, you know, a couple, a couple of highlights as we're going through it that this, you know, this presentation. It's only it's only covers the operating budget. Capital information will be circulated later. And like we talked about a little a little bit earlier that, you know, we're being very careful not to fall into the trap of offsetting a, you know, a reoccurring operational budget with one time revenue sources being free cash or stabilization. So you know, what you're seeing here is what we're trying to budget for. Comparing it to our reoccurring revenue sources. And the expectation is that similar to the past and common in Massachusetts, that capital requests. Given that one time nature will be and continue to be funded with our certified free cash amount.

00:38:28,000	S5:
So these really these are the key. These are the key drivers. They're all going to be talked about at length as we move through. So I won't spend much, much time here. But I think the the elephant in the room is the 11.64% operating request from the Hamilton Windham Regional School District. Again, this is similar to their theirs, similarly to ours. This is there. Our first pass. That is their first pass. You know, like they always tell us they're going to, you know, really sharpen their pencils and go to work and, you know, try to try to get it down from there. But they usually start on the high end. But that's what we're looking at right so far. So I think, you know, the really the takeaway from this slide is that we have a bunch of fixed costs that, um, are exceeding our revenue growth or our ability to raise revenue. And, you know, I think one thing worth pointing out that, you know, although the wage increases is 3.74%. We just last year was the first year of, um, three of our four DPW, three of our four unions was the first year of the contract. And when looking at staffing costs as a whole, the salary adjustments we've been able to maintain at about slightly below 9% to slightly above 9% over a three year average, so you're looking at 3% to slightly below 3%. Salary and wage adjustments over a three year period. So you know, some depending on the union agreements, some are more in the first year, some are less than the out years, some are more in the middle or less. It's you can see that number up and flow. But you know, we just we're working on the library now. But we were able to successfully settle our labor agreements in what we believe to be, uh, a, an achievable pace is particularly given the labor pressures that we're seeing. Um, you know, somewhat like with looking at Republic and the auto unions and the teachers unions and all that, they're coming up with numbers that are much higher than 3% a year. Uh, you know, probably 2 to 3, even four times that. So, you know, I think we've done good this round at keeping in trying to stay within our means. But you know, we'll see. See what that looks like three years from now. And I guess with that I'll jump off and Jeff is gonna, you know, run through kind of the granularity of the budget. And, you know, we'll find him and I will jump in here and there and any questions, let us know as we go through it.

00:41:18,467	S9:
All right. Thanks, Steve. So this page sort of brings together a lot of what Steve just just talked about here. And so this is a sort of a pro forma version of what we call the tax rate recap, which takes all of our expenditures, all of our revenue sources, and comes up with what we need to raise from a tax levy in order to fund the budget that's presented at this point in the year. And then that is compared to what is the tax levy limit? The prop two and a half levy limit, um, that the state dictates for us each year. And so if you look to the bottom of this page, you can see that for FY 26, we ended up about 215 $216,000 under the levy limit. Um, a big part of that is because our new growth came in ahead of expectations. Local receipts came in a little ahead of expectations. So we end up under the levy limit. When you look to FY 27, you actually see a big red number there that tells you we are nearly $1.3 million over the levy limit. Um, you know, since I've been here, that's certainly the biggest number we've had, uh, you know, coming out of the gate. Uh, typically smaller communities like Wenham. Getting back to what Steve said, where most of the funding of the local budget falls on the municipality. We don't have the luxury of having 40, 50, 60% of our budget covered by the by state aid. Um, you know, most of us are, you know, no small community ever like, does this analysis at the beginning of the year and says, wow, we have way too much money. Um, you know, that number is almost always red when you start and you whittle it down. But what's concerning is if the number is so high this year that it's, you know, when we start and that number is, say, at about 600,000, it's a little bit more manageable. We can make some cuts to school, make some cuts, we'll make some revenue adjustments and things like that to get under the levy limit. Looking at a number of nearly, you know, a little over 1.2, it's it's going to be difficult to get there. Um, we have a couple of sort of things we can do. Steve alluded to one earlier. If we look, um, under the on this slide here, public works, you'll see, is one of the largest growth in percentage and dollar amounts at $130,000, or nearly 8%. And that's the trash contract. And so one of the tools we have available to us this year, based on what the fin com has elected to do over the last couple of years is to over fund the stabilization account. And so we are potentially looking at using stabilization funds over, say, the next three years to help sort of ease in this additional cost, you know, for, for the trash collection. We knew it was coming. It's going to be less than we actually thought. But that is one area where, you know, as Steve mentioned, we don't typically like to use one time money for the operating budget. But because this is a sort of a one time situation where a large increase to a needed service in town, um, we need something to help us sort of ease this in so that, you know, but if we even if we eliminated that whole increase that's taking, you know, 100,000, $130,000 off the top, that doesn't even get us to $1 million over the levy limit. So it's going to take a lot of different things. As Steve mentioned, the pension and benefits there is is up about 331 that dropped by approximately $70,000 yesterday when we got our assessment. We were counting on a 10% assessment increase from the Essex Regional Retirement Board. It came in at just a little over 4%. Um, so and we'll get more into how that works later. But, you know, that's a, that's a nice, um, you know, outcome for us. But again, only $70,000. We're still, you know, taking these two things into account. We're still $1 million over the levy limit. Um, the biggest number here is obviously the Hamilton Wenham school, the operations and the debt. They're going up, you know, over 1,000,005. Uh, that's sort of the, you know, going to be the deal breaker for us. There's no there's nothing we can do on our side that's going to get us below, you know, below $1 million without a significant change to that, that one number. Um, you know, I will say, generally speaking, I think we do a pretty good job across the departments. Um, you know, managing these budgets and things like that. Uh, but at the same time, you know, I've been here a couple of years and, you know, I have observed the way I approach municipal budgeting is and I think a lot of folks and a lot of communities do is you look at needs and wants, and then you actually have what you'd call nice to haves. And I think in one of them, we've crept into a few too many nice to haves. Excuse me. Um, and I don't know if that's because we've had Arpa money floating around or CPC money floating around, but I think that's one area, you know, we're going to have to address a little bit. It's not going to completely eliminate this number, but I think it's just a mindset, um, that I'd like to see us address and to kind of give you a scope of that. I'll pick on Rich Souza. So a couple of years ago, Rick had, um, a truck that was coming offline. And I'm going to call it a two ton dump truck, but I think it's bigger. But we had 2 or 3 of these things, and they're the really, really big trucks you see out on the highway, um, during the big snowstorms. And we had like three of them. And so Rich evaluated a new one was going to be like $250,000. And he looked at it and he said, you know, I just can't justify getting another one of those just because we have one of those, because we really only use it if it doesn't snow a whole lot. You know, we might only use it a handful of times in a year. So instead of buying that, he bought, I think, a one ton, you know, um, smaller vehicle that was essentially $150,000 less. And I just think as a municipality, when you're spending tax dollars, you know, that's kind of the mindset you have to have. You can't always be sort of like having that thing that, you know, it's nice to have when you need it or whatever. You need to sort of take that approach to things. Um, you know, so that's just something I've kind of I've noticed and I'd like us to think more about. Uh, and another thing I sort of like us to think more about is maybe look at things a little bit more holistically. I think we tend to look at things in silos, and we don't always think about, you know, how that impacts other departments or what other departments needs might be. Um, and so I'd like to see us do a better job of that. Um, because I think what I see a lot of times, as I see requests for things that I wouldn't necessarily consider a need, and I can think of a number of things that would be a need ahead of that, but another department might not put in the request. And so, you know, I'd like us to pay a little bit more attention to, you know, to each other and how, you know, think about other people's needs within the system, because I think we could do a better job of that. Um, that's that's the end of my soapbox on that.

00:48:36,300	S3:
Question.

00:48:38,200	S10:
Is the potential upside re-evaluation of Penguin Hall included in somewhere in these numbers?

00:48:44,567	S9:
Yeah. So if you look at the estimated new growth in the first column on the very right there towards the bottom, you'll see new growth is $276,000. Um, typically we estimate $150,000 for that. That number came in at about 276. So and Terry can correct me on this, but I would say technically new growth maybe came in a little bit shy this year of our target, because Penguin Hall added about $150,000 to that number. So technically, you know, we were targeting $150,000 for new growth, and we probably only came in at about 125 in true in true new growth. And, you know, that was a point I was going to make. So I thank you for bringing this up.

00:49:22,767	S10:
I'm sorry. So it's in the 26th number.

00:49:24,801	S9:
It's in that 26 number. And then that 26 number when we roll to 27. Um, the you know, if you look at the levy limit the next year, it goes from 21,003, 32 or 21,000,003 32 to 22,000,148, the the levy limit and the estimated new growth in column one. Those go. Those get added up together and then you add 2.5% to get to that. That 2020 2.148 million number in the next column. So it's built in now and it's you know, now is just part of the base. But we got a one time adjustment in FY 26 for that coming on board. I mean, the interesting thing with Penguin Hall is that it was probably one of one of the largest taxpayers for many, many years. And then it went away. And now, you know, and now it's coming back as new growth. Um, so, you know, that's, um, you know, that will be interesting to see. What's that? Yeah. Um, you know, will that I my, my hope obviously is that that continues as a taxable Entity and stays on the tax rolls. I mean, in all likelihood, it will not not be, you know, the type of building it is now. It's probably going to be developed in some way. Uh, you know, that hopefully will produce even more, uh, you know, more new growth for us there. But but yeah, that's in there. Um, and that's a one time adjustment. And that's why, you see, you know, the new growth drops back down to 150 next year. Um, and, you know, you hope we can you know, we can we can keep pace with that 150 as we see, we probably didn't this year. We've been well over the 150 for many years. But we always this is part of the exercise of doing this, is that you're one of the reasons the numbers look bad is to start out you're always being conservative. Uh, if I ran you a six year, you know, average of estimated new growth, it's definitely over 150. Um, but you don't want to run it. Run into a problem where the entire budget and being under the levy limit is predicated on $275,000 of new growth, because, as you can see here, even with Penguin Hall being thrown in as a one time 150, you only get to 275 this year. So, you know, we have to take these conservative approaches. And that's why you end up with free cash, because you take the conservative approach up front and then the real numbers, you know, get certified. And, you know, the revenue does come in a little bit higher. Yes. Bob.

00:51:51,968	S11:
Could you comment on how the past two tax payments that were collected reflect in the budget and the timing of when that money might be available to use for some purpose?

00:52:03,467	S9:
Sure. So, um, what Bob's alluding to and a lot of you in the room probably know, but we had one significant property that had back taxes on Larch Row. I think technically it was two properties. And then we also had another property, I think, over on Maple Street, that is I don't think it's closed yet, but the sale is going to close soon and we will receive actually another 200,000, but the large rural property brought in about $700,000 of back taxes, and that our treasurer, Belinda Young, deserves a lot of credit for working hard to correct a tax lien that was done incorrectly in the past, get that tax lien reapplied and just chasing it down over the last few years, and essentially forcing a sale of the property and getting the town paid. So we have 700,000. We're probably going to have $900,000 that will come into our cash this year. It doesn't we can't use it for our budget in FY 26 even though it came in. Um, what will happen is when we close our books in June, the state will certify our operation, and that's what they'll calculate, our free cash. And that will become available for, you know, whatever the town, you know, deems it will appropriate it for. But that amount won't be certified until after July 1st. So it's not free cash that's available to us in our meeting coming up in April for this budget we're talking about. So it's really going to be more of an, you know, something. We either have a special town meeting later in FY 27 where we would appropriate some of that money, or it would be appropriated at annual town meeting in April of 2027. Um, and that will be a one time, you know, a one time thing for us as well. Uh, you know, I think we have some ideas internally on how we could utilize utilize those funds. Um, you know, getting back to Jared's point at open, it might be a, you know, that's a time we, you know, we put some money away into OPB to get ahead there. Um, you know, I'll talk about some uses I have, you know, a plan for it when we talk about the finance budget. But yeah, those two points are both important parts of what's going on going on here.

00:54:15,767	S3:
To just to follow up questions, Jeff. So on that, on that point, what you're saying is that $900,000 is not going to be in the mix as a potential source for closing any part of the what now is a $1.2 million gap.

00:54:31,067	S9:
Exactly. You know, I mean, we, um. Yeah. Unfortunately, it just it wouldn't be certified money by it, which is and this is one of the sort of nuances of municipal finance. It is. Absolutely. The 700 has been collected. And it's absolutely, you know, money sitting in our bank right now. But under the mass general law, you know, we're not allowed to utilize it. It's kind.

00:54:48,701	S3:
Of crazy. We have it. And yet it can't be used potentially until the next annual town.

00:54:54,267	S9:
Yeah. Yeah. And and that's the basis of fund accounting is basically everything. All of your operations, your expenses and your revenues go into what are called control accounts throughout the year. And at the end of the year, you close those into undesignated fund balance. And so until you go through that process of closing it out, putting it into undesignated fund balance, and having the state say, you know, give it their blessing, it's unavailable. And because of the timing, um, you know, it wouldn't work because we have to have a meeting before June 30th. But if we had a meeting in August to do this budget, we would be able to utilize it. Um, you know, that does raise the point of you could make the case to have a special town meeting in October or November when, you know, free cash is certified to, um, you know, adjust the adjust the budget. Um, first, you know, if we end up making some harsh cuts on our side to get the number down, you know, you could sort of say the departments, you know, things might be tough for, um, you know, a little bit. But maybe we can help you out with a special town meeting in the fall.

00:55:56,100	S3:
Right. Um, this is my second follow up question, and this relates to the Penguin Hall point. I know we don't want to spend too much time today talking about past or looking to the future here, but explain again, if you would, whether the 276. Well, the first question, the 276 330 in estimated new growth. That's a that's an actual number. That's what came in or that's last year's projected number.

00:56:19,901	S9:
That's an actual number that Terry prepares on the assessor side of the ledger, gets submitted to the Division of Local Accounts. They certify it.

00:56:26,467	S3:
And that that's okay. So that's a real amount of money that has come in. And did you say that 150 of that is relating to Penguin Hall?

00:56:35,000	S9:
Basically.

00:56:35,467	S3:
How is that the case?

00:56:36,467	S9:
So and so just to kind of put a little bit more color around what, what new growth is. So new growth is the, the that you have new new growth. Someone builds a new great room on their house and it's worth $100,000. That $100,000 is new assessment, new growth is the the $1,500 of tax that would be generated by that by that. So so Penguin Hall itself is worth roughly $10 million when you apply the the tax rate. That's about $150,000 in tax. So new growth is an actual tax number I see.

00:57:14,000	S3:
So that's a reflection of the fact that Penguin Hall went out of business and is no longer going to be hosting that property, is no longer going to be hosting a non-profit.

00:57:23,100	S9:
Exactly.

00:57:23,601	S3:
Okay. It has nothing to do with money. Property tax revenue that came in from that property in FY 26.

00:57:31,868	S9:
Right. Well, so it will actually come in. So it will become because as of July 1st, it no longer meets its charter to be a tax exempt educational institution. Terry, almost you know, they didn't get a tax bill for November or for August or November. But now we do our what are called your actual tax bills, Q3 and Q4. Those reflect everybody gets their new assessment. Penguin Hall now we they say well we didn't get you in August but now we know we should have been taxing you. So it's a it's a big hit that.

00:58:03,567	S3:
Someone someone will be paying that whether.

00:58:05,667	S9:
Closing someone will.

00:58:06,567	S3:
Pass that way, whether it's the bankruptcy trustee or the new owner or what have you.

00:58:11,267	S2:
Okay. That was my question. Yeah.

00:58:12,868	S5:
Just jump a quick on on new growth. Like a good way to look at it is new. New growth is and this is a situation of new growth that it's you just basically like if it if it didn't exist in the prior year, it exists this year. All that money is considered new growth in the state size. And the reason for that is because proposition two and a half restricts your prior year levy by 2.5%, and then you have the plus new growth, which is which is a mechanism in the law that allows the communities to expand their tax base beyond the 2.5% to account for perceived additional infrastructure that's going to need to be built to support those additions. So that's why it's kind of like a a separate line adjustment. You have your last year levy plus 2.5%, and then you take a look at your list of everything, including new homes, additions, uh, exempt parcels that are now non-exempt. And you build a list of you know, essentially like a mini tax levy for those specific items that didn't exist in the prior year. And then you add it to your last year's levy, plus the 2.5%, and that's new growth. And then the year after that, that new growth is rolled into your is now part of your prior year levy. And you earn you know, I guess depending when you look at it. But you get 2.5% growth by law or any, you know, from 0 to 2 and a half or even whatever the community wants. But by law, you can grow that by 2.5%. And then you look at things that didn't exist in that year in the the new year, and you kind of build that new new growth list. And then the same thing happens that going forward, it happens every single year. And that's that estimate, because you don't know exactly what that's going to be. And we're conservative that 150. And that kind of can be 100. It can be 300. And you can have you'll have years when a big development comes on. Like we were looking at Pulte Homes, we probably would have realized Lies $1 million

01:00:17,567	S5:
a year and new growth over. You know, I think there were 20% of our budgets. You probably looking at like $1 million in new growth a year over four, you know, for four years straight as that development came online. But then it goes away. I keep adding a million. The million is rolled into your budget every year. And then moving forward, if that makes sense.

01:00:40,267	S9:
Yeah, I'm actually thinking of I think you had a slide on this at one point, but the idea behind new growth was so prop two and a half said you couldn't increase existing people's taxes more than two and a half or not each house. But in the aggregate, you couldn't increase taxes on your assessed values more than 2.5% a year. But the concept of if you took a simple town, right, that had two houses and it costs $10,000 a year to run, so let's just say it cost $5,000 a house. Well, if a third house guest gets built, presumably it costs more to run the town now, right? There's more kids to educate. There's more public safety coverage needed, whatever. And so that's where the concept of new growth came in. It's sort of interesting when you think of something like building a great room or improving your kitchen, you know, gives rise to to new growth because it doesn't really increase the cost of running your, your town. If someone puts in a new kitchen or something and, and Penguin Hall kind of falls into that too, just because they lost their charter on, you know, as of July 1st, it didn't make their impact really on the town of Wenham any different. It's just they switched from tax exempt to taxable status. So, you know, it's it's sort of a different thing. I wouldn't think it happens all that often and certainly not at something of that magnitude. Um, so all right.

01:01:55,667	S12:
So Geoff, I've got one thing I just want to point out. So, um, the folks that are here and I appreciate I see department heads and I see citizens here, and I just want to point out something that the four folks that you see here on the Finance advisory Committee, we're primarily chartered to help shepherd the budget and be the first kind of volunteer citizens to kind of challenge things and make sure that we understand it and make a recommendation to the Select board at the town meeting. So when you can, you go back a slide. Jeff, as you heard Jeff mentioned before, the questions about nice to haves need to have these sorts of things. Um, this group of four and hopefully a fifth soon is going to be asked to stand up at the at the annual town meeting and make a recommendation for this budget. Right. And right now, the way it's coming in is that $1.2 million. We've we as a group have to decide are we going to recommend this. Right. And 1.2 million over the levy limit is like a 7% tax increase on on all the citizens of the town. Right. So, um, one of the things that that we're challenging the, the town and the department is are here. I appreciate that. And the citizens also paying attention. Um, you know what what we are struggling to do. What we struggle to do every year is understand whether we're comfortable with the increases that you see on each one of these line items, right? Um, are they is this a reasonable expectation with where the economy is, where what the level of service is, how things are going with the trash, these sorts of things. We're asking the the town to and the department heads to to help us not just look year to year to year about the changes that are happening in the town, but also help us benchmark it against neighboring towns for each one of these line items. Right. So is the is the cost of the public works. Is is the cost of public safety, is the cost of the electric education that that we are funding as citizens? Reasonable. Right. Is it. Is it on par with our neighbors? Is it significantly more or is it significantly less? Why are we okay? Are we okay with paying significantly more than a neighboring town? Because we, as you know, when I'm in, one of them, Citizens want to have, you know, superlative service. So as you guys are looking at your budget and working with Jeff, um, just understand that this is something that we're pushing on, Jeff, to do to to help establish those benchmarks and think about it. So I know you guys are having those conversations with Jeff, but this is what the Finance Advisory Committee has asked him to do. And that's where that pressure is coming from.

01:04:29,067	S9:
Yeah. And I would add to that it's not always just neighboring communities, but we're also evaluating, you know, what we consider reasonable, you know, comparable communities to. And that is different for you know, it's not the same for every function in one of them either, I think. Um, but yeah, I think what the fin com is trying to do is a really interesting undertaking and I think can be really helpful. It's going to prove to be a lot of work, but at the same time, moving forward, I think it will it will help the budget process, because if we've done the due diligence to say we understand how we operate, we understand why it's more or less than a comparable community. Um, it makes it easier to move that budget through and stand up at a town meeting and say, you know, we support this wholeheartedly. And so, you know, I think there'll be things we learn to help us streamline. There'll be things we do that helps other communities streamline. I know I've had conversations with West Newbury where we've exchanged some of those, some of those ideas, and we'll do it with a few more. But yeah, thanks for making that at that point.

01:05:29,000	S9:
Um, this this will sort of, um, it just takes that prior slide and it just kind of shows you, you know, in a, in a pie chart. Um, you know, what the, the budget really looks like. And Steve sort of alluded to this earlier. So the school budget in Wenham and in almost every community is somewhere between 50% to 57% of the budget in Wenham. It's it's just under 54%. Um, and that's, you know, pretty, pretty standard across most, most communities that are similar to us. And then it sort of follows suit. I would say were similar to most communities. You know, public safety is, you know, sort of your second biggest piece. Um, pension and benefits of more touches. The top, uh, is your third and then Public works is fourth, and then General Government is fifth. That's pretty standard in most communities. But if you think about that, um, you know, if you look at the top of public works and then go all the way around, um, you know, to the general government, the top of general government, you know, there's a whole lot of little slivers of the pie in that top, you know, whatever. One third, one quarter percent of the pie up top, it's really those five things that are the, you know, the key, the key drivers and, um, you know, pension and benefits being third. Um, you know, that's what makes, you know, managing headcount and staffing, you know, so important, uh, you know, for a small town like Wenham, because, uh, in addition to, you know, adding staff in any of the departments on a full time basis is is not only going to increase whatever the specific budget is, whether it falls under public works or general government or whatever it is. But it's also going to add to that pension and benefits piece as well. And I think we do a pretty good job of, of that where we, you know, where we make good use of part timers, where we can um, and, you know, I wouldn't say we're to, to top heavy on, on full timers, uh, you know, as we look at it sort of generally for, for when, um, but you know what, what this all represents is about $28.2 million is what needs to be raised. That's what we that's what's not covered by state aid. It's not covered by local receipts. It's not covered, you know, covered by any other revenue source we have. Um, that's what we have to, you know, levy on the tax, the taxpayers. And looking at that, we really need that to drop to about 27 million to get to the levy limit. Um.

01:07:56,968	S9:
What we've done here, we've broken. We've broken this presentation up into sort of functions. And this is how the door looks at things. You know, general government, public safety, public works, education. And so the first slide here is general government. Um, and this is, you know, I sort of tell people that, you know, this is town hall, uh, if you want to sort of think of it, just kind of the general, the general operation to run, you know, run the town. It's not the direct services, it's not public works, it's not public safety. It's all the things that, you know, this is sort of the engine that makes the rest of it run. Um, you know, if if Terry doesn't do her work and the assessor's office, we don't we don't assess the property. You know, once the property is assessed, you know, then, Belinda, in my office, we've got to actually, you know, issue tax bills and get the money collected. Uh, you know, then you move to, you know, the select board and Steve's office, uh, you know, in the clerk and land use, things like that, you know, then we start, you know, kind of just running the general operations of the town, um, you know, and this is, you know, if you look at us, we're going up about 3.8% in total. It's about $80,000. We go from just over 2.1 to just under 2.2 for the year. Um, you know, there's a couple of you know, it's interesting when you look on the far right side, there's some numbers that are big percentages but maybe aren't necessarily big, you know, big numbers in terms of dollars. But, you know, one of the big ones is that if you look down at that municipal audit number, um, that actually covers two pieces. It covers our municipal audit, and it also covers our ope valuation, uh, actuary that we used to do that every two years. So this happens to be a year. We're doing a full valuation of the ope. So there's a $6,000 charge in there. And that's why you see the increase, um, increase in the budget for this year. It's actually a $7,000 charge. But our new auditor, we are going to be paying $1,000 less so that the net is $6,000 there.

01:09:53,467	S10:
Um, Jeff, when will the ope open the new open report be available?

01:09:57,868	S9:
Probably like probably sort of by the end of the fall of 2026. I would say we submit we submit all of the, you know, the the payroll and personnel data and the health health insurance data to the actuary. Um, you know, probably starting in the spring. And he amazingly turns it around pretty quickly. So I think usually we have a draft, you know, September ish. Um, and usually the draft is pretty good. There's not a whole lot of issues.

01:10:26,868	S10:
And the pensions on a two year cycle as well. Right.

01:10:29,767	S9:
Yeah. The pension does they, they they have been in the past. They do sort of an interim one. Um, we invent them for pep. We do one every two years. I, you know, by comparison and Essex, we did a full valuation for OPEC every year and sort of like an interim one, a, you know, a smaller, cheaper one in between. And that's what the pension board's typically done is like a mini evaluation halfway.

01:10:52,767	S10:
Is this an on year or an off year for the pension? I'm just curious.

01:10:55,567	S9:
Pension should be on this year to I believe.

01:10:57,367	S10:
It's January, isn't it?

01:10:58,501	S9:
Yeah. Okay. Um, so thanks. Um, and you know, everything else you see here. I mean, basically most people that you see here, uh, you know, the, um, the town administrator line went up a little bit here. That's a reflection of Steve's new contract. Most of the other things on this list are just 3% colas for, uh, the general government employees. Um, so, you know, this, generally speaking, you know, it's this is $80,000, the 1.2 million that we're over. Um, but generally speaking, not a whole lot of of of big ticket items in here. We'll kind of walk through the individual departments and give you some explanations there. Um, but not not a whole lot of room to, uh, to make, make changes. Um, this is when we really want to focus on this $50 moderator budget. As a real point on my side, I'd really like to rein him in a little bit. He actually spent 40 of it last year, which we needed to talk about. Um, the Select board.

01:11:58,767	S3:
Uh, you know, I'm not here to defend it.

01:12:00,968	S9:
Yeah. Um, select board. Uh, really, you know, they have um, you did add a new item last year. You added about $1,000, I think, to do sort of community outreach and things like that, which added to your general expenses. But typically speaking, it's, you know, it's just the stipends for the five select board members. Um, so, you know, not not a lot of growth or anything to, uh, earth shattering there. We don't know.

01:12:30,968	S9:
Town administrator we've just, you know, I didn't get into too much salary detail because that's just the one person, um, and then his actual, uh, expenditures on the bottom part, you know, he's just level funding, uh, across the board there. Um, some of that is probably contractually obligated in terms of, uh, you know, having money in there for, um, training and things like that. Um, so that wouldn't be able to be cut. But, um, you know, overall, not a whole lot of wiggle room in that budget either.

01:13:04,567	S9:
Um. Let's see. Uh, finance committee. Uh, much like Roger, you guys out there spending 250 like it's nothing. Um, not a problem there. Uh, reserve fund. Reserve fund is always a sort of a funny one to explain. So every year, historically, one of them allocates $125,000 to the reserve fund. And what that is, for those of you who aren't aware of it, is the Finance Committee. Reserve fund is money set aside for what is deemed sort of unusual, unexpected emergency type, um, things that occur during a year that the finance committee is giving, given authority to free that money up and pay for something. Uh, you know, in another budget or maybe something that's not even in a budget because it was so unusual and unexpected. But the reserve fund is actually not a budget that gets spent. It only gets transferred. So anytime you know when someone says, oh, we need a reserve fund or an emergency fund, um, you know, for this or that, the money doesn't actually get spent and charged to the reserve fund. It's actually that the budget of the reserve fund is reduced and that budget is moved to, you know, another department, you know, if the police needed more staffing or something, it would be 25,000 would leave the reserve fund and it would move to the police, um, salary budget or something. So this just sort of shows you, you know what? I added a line here just to show you, you know, in FY 24 we, we, we allocated 125. We only spent 87. Uh, last year it was a more challenging year. We had 125, um, but we spent 108 uh, and then in the current year, um, you know, sort of historically we're sort of ahead of schedule. We've already spent 47.5. And you know, we're basically, you know, just through November. But we've got a couple of, you know, big ticket items in there early in the year. And one of those is the 25,000 we had set aside for the food pantry, which, you know, at some point, maybe something where, you know, we actually rescind and move back into the the Finance Committee reserve, depending on, um, you know, how things evolve in that, in that situation. Um, so we're doing 125 again, uh, for FY 27 as of right now. Uh, one of the things I tend to propose in a lot of years is actually increasing this number and making changes to, to actual departmental budgets and sort of rightsizing those. So if we have departments, let's say, where, you know, there's budgets that are, um, you know, the budget is ten grand, but we typically only spend 7 or 8. Uh, you know, maybe we reduce that budget by the 2 or $3000. But to be safe, we add, you know, maybe we add $1,500 to the reserve fund to account for reducing that other budget. So you're sort of hedging your bets a little. Um, but it puts the money, you know, in a more general pool where we can use it to offset any expenditure versus if it's in Steve's training budget. You know, it's just sort of stuck there. And we'll have to do a line item transfer at some point to move that out in May or June. Um, so that's something we may look at, I think, this year, just because we're almost certainly going to need to make some cuts across the board to, to get down to a manageable number in terms of a levy limit.

01:16:15,567	S2:
Geoff. Yep. So how does this account work? Is it a balance forward or does.

01:16:22,100	S9:
It go every year out to free cash.

01:16:24,000	S2:
Free cash.

01:16:24,567	S9:
Yeah. So that like last year we produced $17,000 of free cash, um, out of this, uh, you know, and I think in some years it's, you know, it's been much higher. It's been closer to even 100 when you have a year where not a lot of unexpected stuff happens. Municipal audit we've sort of spoken about already.

01:16:44,367	S9:
Oh, another problem child. Um, so the assessors. Um, this is actually, you know, getting back to my my discussion earlier about, um, you know, just kind of managing budgets in a, in a different way. Um, this is really a great example of Terry, you know, kind of came to me and we worked through some things in her budget that were sort of out of out of whack. Um, and so Terry's budget was in limbo because, you know, as you might recall, we switched from sharing an assessor with Hamilton, uh, to moving the operation completely to Wenham. I don't know, a year. A year or so, I think. And so last year's budget was sort of in flux because we, um, you know, Terry was at a lower salary as more of an assistant, and we were paying a big chunk of money to, to Hamilton. Uh, that stopped halfway during the year. And so, you know, actually, if you look at the FY 25 actual column there, you can see, you know, we only paid 18, you know, $18,000 for joint Services, which was just a small amount compared to what it would normally be. Even though Terry's salary increased. We still ended up spending less than we spent in FY 24, but it gave us a challenge in how to budget for FY 26. And so what we decided to do was sort of look at it and say, well, what were we normally spending between, you know, one position and the joint payment to Hamilton? And we sort of took that information, adjusted for Cola, and then came up with that number. And we we said, okay, that would leave like $38,000 to, to use for an assistant. Um, when we looked at the budget this year and we, we looked at what the actual hourly rate was and what the hours worked were going to be, we realized we were we were definitely over funding the assistant line. And so, you know, we didn't just leave that at the higher number and say, oh, that's a nice little pot of money for me to have. You know, we we talked it through and we actually reduced that number quite a bit. I mean, you can see we you know, we dropped it by about $12,000, you know, nearly nearly 29%. I guess it looks like. So you know that that's that's a win for the town there. But at the same time, Terry said, well, there's other things I sort of like to do. Um, you know, we need to bump up some contractual services and, you know, pay some people that do some more inspections. And, and I know this is a focal point for the fin com sort of making sure that the assessing operation, you know, is equitable and fair and, you know, and staying on track and doing a good job of assessing properties. And so, you know, as I talked to Terry, I said, sure, I mean, if you're saving me 12,000 on the top part here and you want to spend whatever it might be an extra, you know, six or something, you know, on the, on the actual expense lines, um, you know, let's do that. And so the net result is, you know, Terry's going to have a, a better budgeted operation that still comes in at a, you know, 1% lower than last year. And, you know, so I think that just kind of speaks to my point of, you know, it's not always just, you know, a continuation of the same. We need to sort of reevaluate our operations and figure out, you know, do we just do this because we've always done it or, you know, is there a chance to be sort of more effective in how we manage the town resources here? And this is, I think, just as a really good success story is, you know, the assessing department is already working really well. Um, and this is only going to make it work better moving forward. But at, you know, at a lower impact to the town. So so hats off to Terry there for that.

01:20:13,767	S9:
Um, these are lumped together because they're both sort of legal. So tax title expense. Every year we set aside $10,000 to work on essentially tax liens. Um, and this gets back to the large sums of money we just collected. Um, you know, we don't always spend more than $10,000, but we have the last couple of years. And the reason for that is because there's been lots of legal work, you know, on the large road properties, you know, on a Cherry Street property, um, on the Maple Street property. And so we overspent that budget. But at the same time, you know, that spending an extra, probably $5,000 there, uh, allowed us to collect, you know, $900,000. Um, and I would suspect that the $10,000 is now probably a, you know, that'll probably be more than we typically need, uh, moving forward because we've, you know, just done such a nice job of cleaning up so many old sort of problems. Um, but, you know, that's pretty standard. You want to, you know, you want to have enough there that you can take care of things and get ahead of tax title, uh, instead of ending up in the situation we were in where, you know, tax title kind of got out of hand. Uh, and, you know, we spent a lot of time and effort, you know, trying to get it back under under control. Um, so that's the, you know, the ten that we typically do the legal budget, you know, we budget 100 every year. And, you know, we come pretty close to it, I would say most, most years. Um, you know, you'll see we were under 90 in FY 20. For FY 25 we bumped up, you know, 10,000. We almost spent the whole thing. And, you know, if you think about what went on in FY 25, uh, you know, lots of activity around three a, uh, you know, we had multiple town meetings. You know, like, that was a sort of a high watermark year. Um, but, you know, you can't really predict, um, the what the legal services need will be. So I think, you know, this is a probably a pretty, um, a pretty right sized number. Um, you know, it's going to be pretty close to that. You know, most years and I'm sure they've they've gone over that at times in the past as well.

01:22:24,167	S9:
All right. So finance. Um, yeah. We've got, uh, you know, me, Belinda, Jen and Janet. Uh, our wages are going up a little bit more than the 3% Cola. The reason for that is back in, uh, when was it? June? July? When did we have our last special town meeting? We approved stipends for the assessor, the town clerk and the treasurer. And so you'll see that Belinda is going up more than the the 3%, because the $1,000 stipend was, was voted by the town meeting. And so that that pushes her up over the 3% and pushes our average up over the 3% for for our cola in our cola is still the three. But the, the the extra 1000 pushes us to 3.27. Our, our expenses are level funded. Um, you know, they they're pretty right sized I think. So, um, you know, we could probably trim a little bit here or there, but not not a lot to do there. Um, the one thing I want to point out here, uh, and it relates back to this, you know, 700 or $900,000 of sort of found money. As a lot of you in the room know, we use accounting software package called soft, right? It was, you know, just a whiz bang product back in 2002 or whatever when it was developed. But it is absolutely a, you know, 20 year old database system. Um, and is is not it's certainly not an optimal system for us, but we continue to use it because it, you know, it handles the debits and credits correctly and you know, it does what we need. Not all that well, but we get by with it. Um, and it's only about 20, $22,000 a year as part of the software budget. The IT budget. Um, but it's it hasn't been improved or, you know, in probably 12 to 15 years now, and at some point they are going to stop supporting it and tell us we, you know, we need to buy their new product. Uh, which we could go with that or we may switch to another system, uh, like a munis or something, but that is going to be a huge shift. We spend less than 25,000 now. Um, the their other product is considerably more than that. Munis is probably $85,000 a year. So you're looking at a $60,000 increase. Um, for probably either of those software packages. Um, and on top of that, there is probably a $200,000 conversion charge that all these people charge you to, to do. Um, and that is why we've held off, uh, you know, this is when you talk about, you know, needs and wants and nice to haves. Almost all of us would love to have something better than soft. Right. But I don't need to have it. But at some point, they're going to force our hand and we're going to have to to move. And I'm just trying to let people know the magnitude of what that change would be. But I have proposed to Steve that probably 200 to $250,000. Of that, 700, or $900,000 should be set aside for a future accounting software purchase because it is coming, and we will write it out as long as we can. But at some point we are going to need to need to address that.

01:25:50,968	S9:
All right. So I t budget, which as I just mentioned, the soft the the soft right. Packages as part of this um, this budget comes in at 167. This is an area where I don't think Steve or I would like to cut, but in theory, this is an area maybe we could find a little wiggle room. I mean, if you look at our actual state last, you know, 24 and 25 there, they're really more in the 115 120 range. Um, what I would say there is that our it has been subsidized through Arpa for the last few years. So that 115 or 120 for those years might not really be a true representation, um, of of the actual it needs. Uh, and, you know, it's we've moved to a largely cloud based, you know, operation. And so, you know, almost everybody in the room has a Microsoft office account to have a Wenham Town email. Uh, and we have that for all boards, all employees, all committees. Uh, you know, in an effort to, I think, comply with open meeting law and things like that. But those office 365 accounts are not, are not cheap. Uh, and, you know, the the amount of employees and board members and such is, you know, is not insignificant. And so that's a big part of it. Uh, you know, we've we've bought the clear budget software. That's another, you know, 20 or so, um, you know, so, you know, in these I think Jim mentioned a software upgrade he might like to make at the, at the Council on Aging. That sounds like it. You know, could be a reasonable request on his part. So this is, you know, an area I've identified as a place we might be able to cut, but it wouldn't necessarily be the first place I looked.

01:27:38,467	S9:
Okay. Town hall, um, you know, so basically we've got, you know, four salaries here and then a whole bunch of expenses just to run, run the town hall operation. Um, pretty much everybody here just getting a 3% cola. Um, maybe that recording secretary line is is an area we could address. I don't know if there's some changes going on there. Um, yeah. May go up. Okay. Just on changes. Okay. So. Yeah. So that and that. As much as we're here and we're looking at budgets and trying to focus on ways we could, um, you know, reduce that $1.2 million number that were over the levy limit. Uh, you know, as Steve just mentioned, we've had some changes in the recording secretary line here where it might not actually be something that saves us money. It could actually be something that ends up costing us more. And you know, we're going to we're going to need to, you know, that that function needs to be filled in one way or another, whether it's, you know, the person who does it now or spreading it across to other people. But, you know, it's a function that has to continue. So it could be at the end of the day. And you know, this isn't going to, you know, drop to 20. It may actually go up to 28 or something. So these are the things that over the next 6 to 8 weeks where, you know, having to evaluate and build into a model that, you know, gets us to a budget that works for everybody.

01:28:56,167	S9:
Um.

01:28:59,100	S9:
The, the this this budget is increasing a lot. It looks to be increasing a lot. But one of the things that I've noticed since I've been here is that the we run all the posts. We had a postage line item here for town hall, but basically everything ends up getting charged there. And so what we're trying to do is, you know, get this budget to reflect what actually gets charged here, and then reduce other postage budgets that were sitting in other departments that weren't really being utilized, and all the postage was actually being paid through, paid through the town hall light item. So even though that 11, you know, whatever that works out to be an 8 or $9000 increase, it looks like it's a big increase to that budget. It's really, um, you know, just reflecting what's really being spent here, but then pointing out that we have to adjust downward. Um, you know, other, other places, um, you know, one area that we have, you know, struggled with, um, you know, over the last few years, um, and all of you can relate from your own home bills, but, you know, we got stuck in the cycle where our, our budget was trailing what we were actually spending on electricity and gas. So, you know, you can look and see, you know, in FY 26 we budgeted, you know, $7,300 for gas at Town Hall. Well, we spent over $8,000, you know, two years prior. So, you know, you see some big increases there to to get those budgets more on track. But what you will see down below is that there's a utility reserve that used to be. Actually used to be $100,000. Um, that's now been brought down to $20,000 for this, this upcoming year. So we're trying to adjust actual utility budgets and reduce the utility reserve. Um, but, you know, it just made sense to get the actual budgets more in line with what what we're really spending. Um, those are really the big ticket items there. Everything else. Um, town meeting expense. We bumped up, um, you know, based on the this year, we just had. I don't know how you budget for town meeting expense. I mean, we spent $40,000 on town meetings this year. Um, hopefully it will not be a repeat performance this year. Um, but, um, you know, I think we came up with $2,000. That's just kind of a placeholder there. Um, to, to try to increase that just a little bit.

01:31:20,868	S12:
Sorry, Jeff. The the major reason for the the spike was, you know, the significant number of town meetings that we had to have in the past year and the kind of controversial nature and having to.

01:31:32,868	S9:
Certainly the number and I would say probably more the complexity of the issues at hand was probably the bigger driver. Um, you know, you know, certainly like, I mean, like in Essex, we have two meetings every year. Um, but without the complexity. And, you know, we're not spending anywhere near $40,000. I think it was mainly the challenging nature of three a in particular that was a big driver.

01:31:57,300	S3:
How does that break down? So the like none of that 40,000 is attributable to legal fees for example, because that has its own budget line. So like what how do the complex.

01:32:07,667	S9:
I think we probably charge some to that.

01:32:09,968	S5:
Well, you're tired of legal fees. Yeah. I mean yeah.

01:32:11,667	S3:
So 40,000 to.

01:32:13,400	S5:
40,000. None of that is down either. None of that is legal.

01:32:16,267	S3:
Okay. So what is it?

01:32:17,767	S5:
It's all, um, audio visual. Uh, like the clickers.

01:32:22,567	S9:
Oh. That's true. It's got a lot of clickers.

01:32:25,267	S3:
Over time for public safety. Yeah. Was the, um, uh, benefit center of venue cost or that was.

01:32:34,567	S5:
The.

01:32:34,767	S9:
Center of his mic? Or.

01:32:37,367	S5:
Sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Uh, yeah. So there was no fee at the Bennett Center to use the venue. However, we did increase our public safety presence, given the the, you know, the location, size of the place, and but so there was a slight increase. We also had to there was some additional cost above a traditional town meeting with audio visual, uh, with the uh, the utilizing the different space to bring some different equipment. Okay.

01:33:09,100	S9:
Thanks.

01:33:11,801	S7:
It's.

01:33:15,167	S9:
Town clerk. Diane did a really nice job, well ahead of budget. Even season, even starting of sending me, you know, real detailed list of, you know, what her needs were staffing wise and expenditure wise. Um, you know, I don't know if everybody's aware, but the the the town clerk operation over probably the last, I don't know, almost since Covid. I mean, maybe the last five years or so, um, has really been much more challenging. And there's, you know, there's much more early voting. There's more, you know, there's more requests for information from, you know, third party groups and things like that. So Diane has done a really nice job here of walking through, um, you know, what? What goes into what she needs to run, run the clerk's office efficiently. And, you know, looking at this page, uh, you know, we'll see. You know, she's going up 4.5% essentially in total. Uh, but if we look at our wages, much like what I talked about with Terry Harry earlier, you know, she took a hard look at the salary side of things and was able to, um, you know, minimize to come in under the sort of 3% cola there. Um, on on her increase on the salary side because she knew that there was, you know, there were some requirements on the expense side that that needed to be addressed. Um, and if you if you go through here, I mean, I won't walk through all of the all of the items, but you can just see in the description side, you know, all of the numbers that are in the FY 27 proposed. Uh, she's she's really done a nice job of walking through, uh, and showing exactly, you know, sort of how the, how she got to that number. Um, the one question I have on Diane's budget is if there's any way for us to utilize, um, existing funds we have in, like, the early voting and election and things like that, the funds we've already received from the state, I don't know if we have any ability to maybe utilize some of that for your your specific postage. for FY 27. I know the rules around that are pretty strict, but you know. But those are the types of things we'll look into. Are there other pockets of money available to us that we we could use, you know, to kind of mitigate some of these costs and costs increase? Uh, for FY 27. Um, but, you know, she's done a nice job here of just, you know, really breaking down what leads to, um, you know, that, you know, roughly it's a less than a $2,000 or just about a $2,000 increase to her expense budget. Um, I think or. Excuse me. Wrong page. Uh, no, it's about 5000. But, um, but I think very well, you know, organized and justified, but, you know, still, we'll sit down and the fine calm will sit down and try to work through if there's ways, um, you know, to, to minimize the impact of the increases here. Um, you know, as Steve said earlier, it's really it's really the school side is I mean, you know, we can nickel and dime the town clerk budget, but it's it's not going to go a long ways towards reducing a $1.2 million number, but every little bit helps. And if we do it across all the, you know, the departments will, you know, we'll scrap together something.

01:36:18,000	S3:
Just one comment. Um, postage. So not with respect to the town clerk's budget in particular, but the prior one, we said we're going to consolidate more of the postage. And that was, you know, the reason why there's a large percentage increase on the General government. Um, I think just from a presentation point of view, when the time comes for some of these charts and tables to be shown to the public, I think we'd want to be able to indicate where some department postage line items are dropping so people can see like, oh, okay, went up here, but it went down. Yeah, here, here and.

01:36:57,767	S9:
Here I would agree. Yeah. Yeah. And the her the the clerk postage item is a little different than some of the other ones. Like I was talking about like finance police that type of thing. But no points well taken. I mean, we want to show where we, you know, I mean, there'll be another thing we'll see later, but it's the same thing. We took an expense out of one and put it into something else. Um, land use department is, you know, going up just under 3% in total expenses. Um, down a little bit. Um, and then we just, you know, at the 3% cola, not a big budget overall. Um, you know, we, you know, this would be an area, you know, maybe we'd reduce that postage budget. Um, but, um, but yeah, you know, again, the small department where, where, you know, you're not going to make a whole lot of headway, um, but, uh, you know, you still need to will evaluate it and see what we can do. Um, you know, one of the things that is coming up for this year is, um, we use sign. Now, most of the people in this room have probably used sign now to sign something. At some point along the way, they've completely changed their pricing model and how it works, uh, moving forward. And so, um, this might be an area where we can move, um, you know, the charge that's being passed through to land use and other departments might be able to just be consolidated in finance. Um, and right now, it looks like the overall charge could be lower, um, for the year than we currently pay. Right now, we're paying sort of like $300 per each department as you're using it, which, you know, gets to about $1,000 in total somewhere in that neighborhood. It's possible the total charge is going to drop to like $700. Um, so we have to sort of evaluate that. I, I find it hard to believe that they completely change their pricing model to something that's going to lower our cost. Um, so we're sort of evaluating the, the, the billing cycles to see, see how that works. But you know, if that comes to fruition, we are going to be able to save money. That might be an area where we can, you know, eliminate that that cost in probably 3 or 4 departments and just consolidated in the finance department at a lower number.

01:39:08,400	S10:
Um, pardon the question, but what does the land use director do that the town planner does or does not do? I'm not quite sure. The job. I understand the job description.

01:39:21,400	S9:
I, um, I think I'd let Kate kind of speak to that. She's sitting behind you there. Well, no, it looks like.

01:39:28,000	S5:
I mean, the the director kind of oversees the land use department, which, you know, coordinates all uses of land owned by by the town. So it's conservation, it's affordable housing. It's implementing implementation of the master plan signage. Um, you know, we look at the master plan for, you know, increased walkability of the community in the Complete Streets program that will help support that initiative. So those are the types of things that the that the land use director oversees and does. And you know, really the, the the town planner is a part time role at about 19 hours a week. And she primarily staffs the planning board, specifically uh, and the Affordable Housing Trust. So from, you know, an operational standpoint and the needs of those specific boards, that's what the town planner does in a part time capacity.

01:40:35,167	S3:
You may have said conservation. If you did, I apologize. But land use also covers all of the Conservation Commission.

01:40:43,000	S5:
And that's true. So if I didn't say that.

01:40:50,901	S9:
Um, moving on to buildings and grounds. Um, this is another area where we've moved in, um, expenses out of another couple of departments. Into this one. So you'll see an increase here that looks a little larger at 9%. Um, but you'll see the wages wage increases coming in at a little over 3%, which is the Cola plus a, um, adjusting for a longevity payment. That's also due to employees in that department. Um, and then what you'll notice on the bottom is that you'll see two new line items. They're building expense police building expense fire. Uh, those have typically been under the actual, you know, police or fire departments. But one of the things that sort of cropped up last year was, um, everything that could go wrong did go wrong last year. And I think every HVAC system in the entire town of Wenham failed, uh, and a number of other things as well. And they happen in all the buildings. But would it kind of mean us realize was that it would be best if we moved those expenses under the facilities director, under Mike Hardy, um, to let him oversee and spend that money. Um, because what can happen is, if you have a year, let's just say not, you know, if you had a $7,700 building expense line under the police, well, if something goes wrong at another property, that money is not available, you know, in the budget until May when you can do line item transfers, um, to, to address a problem somewhere else. So it sort of made sense since Mike Hardy and the facilities group sort of handle all of those improvements or all those, those repairs and maintenance items to put them all under that one, one umbrella so that we had more flexibility, um, you know, to, to handle it in one budget and rather than having it stuck in certain budgets that you couldn't, you couldn't get to if they didn't, if they didn't need the expenditure, it was sort of just trapped there in that department. Um, so that's, you know, in total we're moving, um, you know, about $85,600 out of those other budgets and into into Mike's budget. And that's really the driver for what you see is a 14% increase to his budget. Um, and overall, it's a, you know, it's a 14% increase to the expenses. And it's a, you know, a 9% increase to its total budget. Um, but, you know, I've talked to the folks in the two buildings there where we've moved stuff over and we came to an agreement that that, that that would make sense and that, you know, Mike would just handle, uh, you know, what comes up in their in their buildings as he does already, but he would just have the funds under himself, uh, rather than having to deal with the other departmental budgets.

01:43:36,100	S9:
The last couple pieces of general government. Um, we a lot money every year to produce the town report, uh, typically comes in around $6,000 or so. And, um, cost of that, like everything else, seems to be increasing. So that budget seems pretty, pretty pretty. Right at about 6500. And then iron rail we've kept, uh, kept level funded at 48,200. Um, you know, for those, you know, in the crowd who aren't completely familiar with it, you know, Iron rail is a rental property. Um, that, uh, the town has over, uh, you know, at the iron rail property. Um, and these are just the expenses required to keep it running. Um, running. You know, day to day. Um, you will see a little bit of a change there. It seems like our gas and electric budgets were sort of out of whack a little bit there. So the net effect is it's a, you know, the the total budget hasn't gone up, but we've we've certainly shifted the gas and electric to be more reflective of the actual activity, uh, over time.

01:44:45,000	S13:
All right.

01:44:48,300	S9:
All right. So public safety, um, there will be one change to to this as we walk. Walk through. Um, but it's a pretty small change in the grand scheme of things. As I mentioned earlier, this is the second biggest budget in the town, uh, after education. Uh, but, you know, obviously, one of the more important things we do is, is, you know, keeping the, the public safe, uh, and providing, you know, emergency services and things of that nature to folks. Overall, the budget's going up a little over five, 5.2%, almost 5.3%. Um, there will be a staffing request in the fire budget. Uh, the permitting budget has an increase in there, but we'll we will be changing that and actually moving that increase to the, the DPW department after after talking to Steve. Um, and and uh, and then permitting uh, which is it's kind of funny. It comes under public safety. Um, but I suppose it is it's, you know, you have, uh, Rich Maloney out there ensuring that, structures in town are safe and inhabitable and all that. And I'll talk a little bit, a bit more about the big, big increase in that budget, which isn't really reflective of of Rich and how he's running the department, but more just kind of the nuances of, um, the joint agreement we have with Hamilton to, to run the permitting.

01:46:12,567	S3:
So why is the tree warden budget going up by 15?

01:46:17,100	S9:
Um, so there's been 15,000 added to the budget to maintain parks. Uh, and originally that request came through and we put it in through tree warden. Uh, but in talking to Steve, you know, we just decided, well, it would make more sense to, you know, have the money under the, you know, the department that's actually overseeing parks in general. So that, again, it's sort of more flexibility of having the funds available. Um, to the, to the department head that's kind of overseeing it in total.

01:46:48,801	S10:
Is the police department part of for pension purposes part of the Essex County retirement or they have their own plan.

01:46:55,968	S9:
So any any employee at the town of Wenham is a that's a full timer is a pension participant is under Essex Essex regional retirement. The only folks who fall under our umbrella who are not under Essex regional retirement are the teachers. The mass teachers is its own separate retirement system. And I don't know if a lot of people are aware, but the the school does not actually pay into that system. That is a state run system. So it's you know, it's sort of an interesting thing when you look, the school represents about 57% of our budget, and they actually do pay into Essex Regional because the folks who aren't teachers, folks like, you know, the superintendent and they still pay in Essex Regional, but all those teachers, there's no cost on the on the school budget for all that pension. So imagine how how high that budget would be if you had that pension carry on on the school budget. Um, so the police, um, you know, if we look at this here, you'll you'll see their expenses are actually going down a little bit. And that's mainly driven by the $7,700 that you saw moving to the building in facilities earlier. Uh, and then the, the, the actual salaries and wages are going up. Um, about 1.2%. I think this number is a little, um, I think confusing. And I think maybe the chief would agree. So there's, there's a little bit of transition going on in the police department. We've had it. We've got retirements. We've got some folks out on leave. Um, you know, we have sort of multiple sergeants in the mix right now. And so the salary numbers, you know, I sort of had to gross up the salary number for FY 26 to account for, uh, you know, folks who will be sergeant by the end of the year. Folks who are sergeants. Um, currently. And so you know that number at 1.2 looks looks really good. But at the same time, I think it's, um, there's a lot of moving parts in this, in this budget. Um, but I think, you know, I've gone through it with, with the chief and his executive assistant, and I think we've captured it fairly correctly. Moving forward. But I, you know, I think we will be evaluating this, you know, as things, you know, change, um, you know, over the next few months in that department.

01:49:12,801	S10:
Um, is the headcount stable?

01:49:15,400	S9:
The headcount is staying the same. Um, you know, we we have you you have a situation where, you know, you have let's just say, you know, you have sergeants retiring who have seniority. Uh, so you have a bit of a savings, but then the folks coming up behind them have more advanced degrees. So they they have a higher cost because of that. Uh, and then we're also, as we hire new people to stay at the, the stable staffing level. Um, I think one of the challenges the chief is noted is, you know, it's getting tougher and tougher to, um, hire officers. And, um, what we're finding is we tend to be getting a lot more sort of senior and experienced folks that are the only folks who are sort of able to attract to the job here. And so they come in at a higher sort of step level. And if in conjunction with that, they have also advanced degrees, um, they can be, you know, fairly expensive for at the patrolmen side. Um, but the staffing level has not increased. Even if we talk about, you know, you'll see a new a new hire or something in the underlying detail down the road. It's a new hire because it's replacing, you know, you've got a patrol person who's moving to sergeant and therefore you need a new patrol person because a sergeant. Well, you're basically, you know, replacing a sergeant is leaving and a new patrol person is coming in, and then someone internally is moving out. But no, this budget does not increase actual staffing. Um.

01:50:45,100	S9:
We shifted this up a little bit this year. You know, typically we listed every single officer. And, um, you know, you know, all ten folks or whatever. We've sort of broken it up into the chief, the deputy, the sergeants, the detective and the patrol officers this year. Um, and what you'll notice is sort of the big changes. You know, the sergeant level is going down, but the patrol officers is going up. And that's, I think, a function of that. You know, you're losing people with seniority at the sergeant level, so you're paying a little bit less there. But the presumption is the folks that we're bringing in at the patrol officer level are coming in with a little bit more seniority and maybe a little bit more, um, a little bit more education, which is, you know, making that increase. Um, but overall, the net effect, when you look at the bottom, you know, we're really only going up a little over 1%. Um, but as I said, I think it's a work in progress in terms of how all the staffing is going to, you know, shuffle out over the next, um, next, you know, a couple of months here. Um, one and maybe I'm overstepping here a little bit, but one area in the budget I think we could address, um, you know, this bottom line here, the gatekeepers, and, I mean, it's gatekeepers, but it says lifeguards, but it's not lifeguards, right? They're just gatekeepers. You know, we're paying $23,000 a year to to employ, um, you know, essentially, I think teenagers at Pleasant Pond, um, to essentially maintain parking, uh, and things like that. Um, I know there's more history to it than, than than that, that I'm not fully aware of. Um, but, you know, if you if you're just the, the black and white finance guy, you look at it and say, well, why do we spend $23,000 to, you know, to have gatekeepers when we sell, like $1,400 worth of Pleasant Pond parking passes? Um, so when we when we get to the point and we're going to be at that point where we are evaluating where we can save, um, save funds. Uh, you know, this could certainly be a place we could look because, you know, when we talk about the fire department, we're going to be talking about potentially adding a new firefighter to, you know, to deal with the, you know, the staffing issues and the response issues that, you know, are growing for our department and every, you know, certainly call department, I think and, you know, I think we'd have to take a long hard look at would, you know, was $23,000 better spend on a new a new fire and ambulance person, or is it better spent on, you know, someone that's monitoring Pleasant Pond? Um, that's certainly a decision to be made. You know, at a policy level by the by the Select Board. Um, but certainly as someone just looking at the numbers, it seems like a reasonable place to at least take a look at.

01:53:31,767	S9:
Police expenses. Um, not really a large part of the overall police budget. When you when you think about it, I mean, the police budgets, you know, just over 1,000,009 you know, almost 1,000,008 of that is is wages. Um, but there are a number of expenses that the department has. Obviously, you've got the basics of just, you know, running, um, you know, the electricity and the gas and that type of thing. Um, but then there are all kinds of different services that they need to participate in and utilize. Um, you know, I've been doing this for 20 years, and I still, for the life of me, couldn't tell you what Bay burn is, but I know we have to pay it. Um, but, you know, there's just different, you know, there's software we use that helps with the management of, uh, staffing. It helps with the management of, you know, data and reporting and all the things that are, you know, required of the of the public safety and the police in this instance, um, you know, and those, you know, add up to, you know, 13, $14,000, uh, all kinds of I mean, I don't know how many of you in the room are familiar with, you know, sort of post George Floyd, all of the, all of the states have adopted new, you know, standards for their police departments in Massachusetts. It's the it's called the Post Commission. And one of the things that's done is ramped up the amount of, you know, kind of training and ongoing field training and things like that that are required by all police departments, not just ours. Um, and those are certainly increasing. So that is, you know, another part of what they're dealing with on that side. But, you know, we're down just under a percent there that's mainly driven by losing that $7,700. Um, but, you know, certainly we can talk to the chief and see, you know, if they're, you know, places that we can nibble around the edges a little bit here and find some, some, some changes, you know, or whatever if needed. But generally speaking, it's a fairly level funded budget.

01:55:31,601	S9:
All right. So fire, you know, you'll see here. I mean, it's, you know, totally increase, you know, just just under 11%. Um, expenses essentially flat. Uh, and, you know, it looks like the wages are, you know, going up, you know, a little over 13, almost 13.5% there. Uh, and as I mentioned, that's really driven by, um, the the desire to add a new firefighter. Um, and, you know, folks have questions. I'm sure the chief and the deputy can, can speak to it. But, you know, as someone who's been heavily involved with the call department in my town or my former town, um, I know that staffing and responses to to calls have become more and more challenging over the years. Uh, if you think of the evolution of call fire departments, it used to be that it was all, you know, a bunch of local guys who worked in town and were always, you know, available at the drop of a hat to get to calls and respond. Um, and that has changed over time. I mean, it now called apartments. You have a lot of folks who don't even live in the town. If they live in the town, they probably work out of town. You know, Monday to Friday. Um, and they have, you know, regular Monday to Friday jobs. So they're less and less inclined to, to make that 2 a.m., you know, ambulance call. Uh, and so one of the things that we we did, if you look towards the bottom there, there's a line coverage. 11,700 last year. It's bumping up to a little over 12,000 this year. That was a new stipend that we added. Excuse me in in FY 26, to provide an incentive to get firefighter firefighters to agree to be the person on call, typically most most useful over the weekend. Um, to say, you know, for a stipend of really a fairly paltry sum, I mean, $50 or something, you know, you'll agree to be the guy who's who's not going to, uh, you know, go down and have a couple of IPAs that post you're going to stay home and be available to. To respond to a call that night and that I think, you know, maybe the chief could weigh in, but I think it's helped a little bit improving the, you know, the responses and the staffing. Um, but, you know, I know Essex we put something like that in place a couple of years ago. Uh, there's less and less call fire fighting forces out in the state of mass. I think, you know, generally speaking. But they're all using this kind of a tool to try to help drive that staffing, um, and get that coverage. Because if you, you know, if you think about it, when we look at this with the new firefighter added there, that would actually move us to five. Um, but, you know, you've got the chief, the deputy, you've got two firefighters, um, you know, on staff now, but you know, those those four folks are really covering everything. You know, they're covering seven days a week. 365 in some fashion. Um, and then you're looking at using the call firefighters to sort of supplement that. Um, and it's just getting more and more challenging for that, you know, to, to work. So the idea is that, you know, one extra person who's got another 40 hours that they can provide to be part of that, that, you know, that, you know, seven day a week coverage, uh, would go a long way towards making it. So, you know, the existing guys either, um, your two exempt employees at the top are, you know, if they're working, you know, much more than the 40 hours a week. Uh, you know, they're, you know, they're not paid because they're exempt, but they're certainly wear and tear on the chief and the deputy. Uh, and then on the firefighters, if they're working more than the 40. Well, now you're paying overtime. And I know Jeff and I have talked about, you know, they run into a situation where, you know, they don't have overtime left in, you know, January, um, and, you know, which, again, sort of puts pressure on the chief and the deputy to, you know, be the folks who have to respond because they don't have, um, they don't have the overtime to let the other two firefighters Uh, respond. So, you know, certainly, uh, you know, we don't have the luxury of telling folks that we have available not to respond because we don't have overtime money in the budget. So, you know, maybe, you know, if for some reason, the town didn't want to move forward with the fire for the new firefighter, um, you'd certainly want to look into into the overtime wages, because if you don't have the extra body, then you're going to need to have more overtime available to have the two existing firefighters, you know, fill fill those, those staffing needs. Um, you know, we did build an increase for overtime as well, uh, just as part of that, because, you know, as I mentioned, we're, um, we're we're dealing with that coverage issue and that, you know, running out of overtime to early in the year. Um, you know, so this is, I'm sure, something that the finance committee, I think David, is on this, um, you know, we'd have to hash out and talk through with the fire department on, you know, what's the right number for, you know, the new firefighter numbers kind of set. Either you do it or you don't. But the you know, the overtime number. You know they can hash through that. But but, you know, generally speaking. Um, you know, I like to say there's, you know, there's really there's sort of three types of fire departments at this point. There's a fully called fire firefighting department, which is kind of like Essex. Um, then there's sort of what I call the hybrid, which is more of what Wenham is where you've got to. You know, you've got some people on staff, you've got the chief deputy and two firefighters. And then there's the Manchester model, which is, you know, a full firefighting force. Um, and, you know, we're looking at, um, you know, a budget of, um, you know, we're looking at a budget of $1 million, um, you know, or a million won here this year. Proposed. You know, Essex is probably at, you know, 650 or 7. You know, maybe maybe close to six. 650. But then Manchester is probably at 2.3, you know. So, you know, every department if you're Essex, you're trying to hang on as long as you can. As the full call department, if you're if you're when you're trying to hang on as long as you can as the hybrid and not get to the to the Manchester the full the full department level. But you know it is something I talked to a lot about in Essex is, you know, folks really need to understand that the value of Call of Fire department plays because, you know, we always said in, you know, in Essex that was saving us at least $1 million a year. You know, here it's probably saving us something similar compared to a full department. So, you know, folks don't like adding headcount, don't like adding expenditures. But at the same time, you know, I think when you're dealing with the call fire department, there's you have to be wary of being a little penny wise, pound foolish. Um, you know, if you suddenly make it so difficult to staff and run your call department, you're just forcing yourself that much quicker to the full time department. And, um, you know, I would imagine, you know, chief could probably weigh in, but, um, you know, I don't think you're just talking about staffing. I don't know that the building you have is maybe even sufficient to have a full time force. So, you know, whatever you can do to keep at least a hybrid call department going, you do that as long as you can.

02:02:39,267	S9:
Um, you know, this is their expense side, uh, really, you know, not going up. Um, it's pretty much flat, all things considered. Um, on the police side, we moved the entire building expense over to the facilities department. We actually left some of it here in the fire department. And the reason there was, um, some of the fire guys, you know, I think they actually do a lot of the stuff they actually run to, you know, whatever, run to Lowe's or whatever it might be and do some of the work themselves. So we left them a little bit there to, to continue with that type of that type of maintenance. Um, so certainly removing I think we removed like 850 there. Um, Other than that, everything is kind of flat across the board. Um, you know, much like the police. It's really. The staffing is the driver. It's not the expenses of the fire department. Uh, you know, it really comes more in the form of capital for them. Um, you know, and that's, you know, also, you know, I like to point out when folks are doing things well and, um, you know, we've got a ladder truck down in Connecticut right now, which the town was, you know, kind enough to approve a sort of a full renovation of that, that ladder truck, um, you know, which was a smart move on the town's part because, you know, for, you know, a couple, you know, less than a couple hundred thousand dollars, you are refurbishing a truck that would cost you, you know, easily 1,000,005, you know, to replace. And so you usually that's one of the hallmarks of a good sort of call fire department as well, is they're really good at maintaining their equipment and letting it last long. Um, and for smaller departments like ours, typically the only time they get rid of stuff is when it will no longer, you know, it won't fit in the building, um, or whatever. They hold on to it until. Because the new one won't fit in the building. Excuse me.

02:04:22,968	S3:
Well, I'm also a resident. I don't want to see my taxes. Well.

02:04:26,868	S9:
Uh, we'll address your your assessed value. We'll take care of that, don't you worry. Um.

02:04:33,100	S9:
Permitting. Um. So this. I was actually just talking to Steve about this, um, the other day. Um, so, you know, I mentioned earlier, Terry does a really nice job in the assessor's office. I know folks don't always love their love, their assessed value and their tax bill, but the reality is, you know, the important part of the assessing office is to make sure that, you know, it's accurate and it's equitable. And and I think we've, you know, there's been some, some growing pains over the last few years for residents as they had some sticker shock. Um, but I think we've really done a nice job of, you know, getting things, you know, where they need to be. And we have a great plan to keep monitoring that moving forward. the other side of that equation. And part of the reason I think Terry and her group are able to do that is because Rich and his group do their job and, you know, you know, referencing Essex again, a time without a really good, robust building inspection department. You know, I know firsthand how how detrimental that is to just how the whole engine runs. And so, you know, this, you know, when we talk about sort of joint partnerships that really work, the library, as Bob is, you know, proving through a lot of comparative data work, you know, the library is just a really, really great joint venture. You know, we really get a great economy of scale and we get a great product out of it. But I would put the building department right up there with it, because we really have a great professional organization that's that's doing the work they need to do and doing it well. And that just helps everything downstream. And so, you know, I think we're really fortunate that we're able to, you know, have a department that even at, you know, $120,000, um, you know, Maggie does a great job with the residents. Uh, it's just really, really running well. And so, you know, Rich, rich emailed me and said, what in the world is going on with my budget? Why is it going up so much? And what you can see is it's, you know, as I said to him, it's nothing to do with what you're doing. You just keep doing what you're doing. You're doing it well. The issue is for the joint programs that I know. Hamilton has kind of the same issue because I've spoken to Wendy about the other side of it where we run the library. But, you know, we build them, you know, when you have stuff that's not totally under your control, it's tougher to, to budget. Um, and, and I think the building permit one is probably the hardest one because it's not even something like the library is just based on assessed values. You know, the building inspection one is a little bit on assessed values. It's a little bit on the number of permits. It's there's a lot more variability to it. So it's tougher and tougher to predict. So you know what you can what you can see is you know we just, um, we've we've been trying to catch up with it for a bit, and so we've, we've grossed it up to try to get, you know, sort of where we think, you know, the budget is going to be, you know, moving forward. And so you see a big increase there. It may or may not be that I'm going to speak with Wendy and try to exchange, you know, I'll give you the library if you give me the joint rec and the, and the, the building permits, um, to get those a little bit more, more in line with where we think they're going to be. Um, so that number may not hold. Um, you know, we that number is going to need a little bit more, uh, fine tuning with Hamilton, but, um, I just wanted to point that out and also sort of give kudos to, to the permanent department, because I just think they're such an essential part of, of what we do here. And on the bottom there, you can also see, you know, when I'm used to absorb software charges, uh, years ago. And uh, they shifted to a different permitting system a couple of years ago now, which actually shifts the permit software cost to the person applying for the permit, uh, which is, you know, essentially move that off of our, our expense line. Um, and then put it on to the person applying for the permit so that that's been a savings for us as well. And I think, you know, as far as I can tell, financially it's working well. And I think for the contractors and stuff, it's working as well also. Um, all right. So this is the last part of public safety. Um, you know, tree warden, we have one employee who gets a stipend that's going up 3%. Uh, then the expenses you can see that looks to be going up an awful lot. Um, but as I mentioned, um, you know, it's not really going up quite that much because we are going to move. Um, we're going to move $15,000 over to be under the highway line where, you know, makes it makes a little bit more sense. Um, so really, you know, it will just be a, um, a flat budget. It'll be a level funded budget on that side. Um, and, you know, I don't know if everyone's aware, but, you know, when M has a huge commitment, you know, to to trees both maintaining and planting new. Uh, doing a lot for Arbor Day. Um, and so this is, you know, I think a good example of, you know, every town has its own sort of, you know, culture and personality. And, you know, this is probably compared to a lot of communities, maybe a higher number. But at the same time, it's also, I think, probably reflective of, you know, something that the community deems important. So, um, so there's tree warden now out of the fun part.

02:09:45,667	S9:
Okay. So, um, you know, here, you know, there's there's two parts to our education. So Hamilton went to regional school district. So when we all sort of focus on, you know, it's it's the big, you know, elephant in the room and it's, you know, half the budget. Uh, but we also have the Essex Tech vocational school, um, which is obviously a much smaller number. Um, but it can be challenging because you know, it's this here on this one, we're assuming like the same number of students continue to go to the school and, you know, the cost will go up about 4.3%. Um, but, you know, we don't always know until probably in like, March how many students are really in the system over there. And you know, so we always have to look at that and think, well, you know, I think it's going to be like three 5360. But, you know, each student could swing that, you know, $20,000 one way or the other. Uh, and I don't know about when them, but I know, in essence, we had a couple of years where, uh, you know, seven additional kids went to the Essex tech and, you know, it was a, you know, a massive spike, uh, in the cost of that program, which is a fantastic program. Um, but the issue is there's not always a great correlation with more kids going to the vote that increases that cost with a, with a sort of correlated reduction in the cost at Hamilton Wenham. Um, so, you know, that's always a little tough. You know, you always think, okay, well yeah, that's going up 150, but at least I'll recognize some savings that, you know, Hamilton went on. But usually that trail's like a year for that headcount to kind of hit. Um, but you know, as we talked about earlier, you know, this is going up 11, you know, a little bit over 11%. Um, you know, it's 1,000,006, I think, in total for the two that it's going up. Um, and, you know, it's really driven on the Hamilton Wenham side. Um, you know, on the bottom you can see the debt portion, um, of the, the school. Um, but that's a that's a small piece. I mean, the debt itself is probably going up, um, you know, maybe $50,000. The big piece is, is, is the actual operations of the school. And there's a couple of components of that. Um, apportionment is a big driver. And so for those of you that don't know, you know, the school bill gets, you know, the school comes up with what it costs to run the school and that of all revenue sources. And then they take that number and they apportion it to the two towns based on a formula. Um, and for the last couple of years, that formula has been working against Wenham. And this is this year is a continuation of that. Um, and the net effect of that is if the budget had stayed exactly the same for FY 26 to FY 27, um, there were no change. Revenues and expenses were exactly the same. Our our cost or our allocation would have gone up $150,000. Um, just based on the apportionment change, no actual change to the operation itself. And so that's, um, you know, that's always, you know, we've been on the good side of that as well, you know, and it's always nice when you're, you know, you're on the good side and, you know, you know, for this particular year, you know, Hamilton is on the other side of that. Their their budget is going down $150,000. You know, just because the apportionment shifted, we're just on the wrong side of it. But that's, you know, right out of the gate you're down $150,000, which, if you think about it, they're going up about 1,000,005. So roughly speaking, 10% of the increase is just related to a formula. Then you actually, you know, start thinking about, you know, what are the cost changes and the revenue changes. And so basically for us, what's happening is the the operations of Hamilton Wenham Regional School District, our share of that is going up $875,000. And then, you know, some of you may have heard this, you know, us talk about E and D, which is essentially the school's free cash. You know, they have used E and D to subsidize the budget for years. Uh, you know, especially since Covid, you know, they were down a lot of positions that weren't filled. So they were, you know, coming in under budget and they were just rolling that money back into the operation and reducing the net assessment to to the towns. They've reached a point now where, you know, they're saying we can't afford to put $2 million of each and, you know, into the system to reduce the expense. We're going to we can only put eight. 800,000 so that reducing 1,000,002 of revenue, that was helping offset the budget. So again, even if the budget expenses stayed exactly the same, the net cost was going up a million. Two um, so our share of that is another $433,000.

02:14:25,968	S9:
Um, you know, so now you're, you know, you're at, you know, about a, you know, whatever a million to something. And then the final piece of the pie is that, you know, if you think back to the Cutler project, you know, we took a few cracks at it. It didn't pass. And so now the school is left to evaluate the buildings that they have and are going to have for the foreseeable future. And they've come up with a plan to deal with, you know, a lot of the safety issues and deferred maintenance issues that are sort of the most immediate need in the schools. Um, and that, you know, they're spending you know, I think it's like another 800,000 or so, something like that. Um, maybe it's closer to 5 or 6, actually. But and our share of that is $188,000. And so you add up the net operations, the end and then this deferred maintenance. And that's our million five right there. Um, and so, you know, the hope is, you know, we'll say to the school committee and we sort of have in the budget meeting we had a week or two ago, you know, this isn't going to work for Hamilton. It's not going to work for Wenham. And they'll go back and look at sort of those three major issues. How can we reduce net operating costs? Can we utilize any additional, you know, E and D for this year to help offset it? And finally, you know, can we continue to defer that deferred maintenance and maintenance and safety or can we do it on a lesser scale? Um, you know, those are all decisions they'll have to make as a school committee. And, you know, I like to say all of us have different fiduciary roles in this process, and their role is to to do what they think is the best for the school district and the students of Hamilton. Wenham. Um, not necessarily to, you know, what is the best thing to reduce the tax rate for the two different towns? Um, and that's fine because that's their role. And then it's, you know, the fin coms role and the Select board's role to see, you know, how do we meet somewhere in the middle or how do we if we agree that this is the only way to move forward with the school, how do we how do we fund this at the town of Wenham level in a way that, you know, works best for for taxpayers?

02:16:33,767	S3:
And Jeff, just a quick clarification. It's the 1.5.

02:16:37,167	S14:
Number that we're seeing right now does not include the expected um, over there discussing for the roof. Right. That's not included.

02:16:45,267	S9:
So yes. Thanks, David. The the roof is a the the high school roof, um, is a whole different project which is in with the MSBA right now for an emergency funding they would cover, I think like 40% of it or so. But yeah, that could be I think the net is what another, you know, probably 3 to 3 to 3.5 million to the towns, which, you know, roughly speaking we take a third of that. So that would that's going to be an override request, a town meeting if, if it gets through the MSBA process, the and it's I know it's in in in there now, but it would have to be through and approved by MSBA, you know in time to get it on the warrants and get it approved. But yeah, that's another um, you know, that would be a debt item that would on top of being $1.2 million over the levy limit, that doesn't put us over the levy limit because it would be a debt exclusion vote. We would be opting to put that over and above the levy limit. But that's still it still rolls to your tax bill, whether it's exempt or not exempt from the levy limit. It's still a it's still a cost. And so that's a that's a great point is that that's another another cost that's going to be, you know, potentially in the mix in April.

02:17:55,601	S5:
Yeah. Just a real quick another cost that we're anticipating coming from the district is a request to fund a feasibility study for renovating all three schools Booker, Cutler and Winthrop. So given the the failure of the the consolidated school, they're talking about doing basically a deep dive as to what exactly needs to be done to bring these schools up to code and in line with their Ed plan. So that's going to be probably another likely debt exclusion article, and probably relatively costly as well.

02:18:34,501	S13:
All right.

02:18:35,300	S9:
Um, this is you know, this just covers the Essex tech part, which I've kind of covered already. We're just assuming the same number of students, sort of a what's a historical annual increase percentage of about 4.3 in this, you know, could probably swing, you know, 40 to $60,000 either way depending on what the actual enrollment is at Essex Tech.

02:19:00,300	S13:
All right.

02:19:00,801	S9:
So public works. Um, you know, if there's, you know, five components here, highway department is always sort of a misnomer, I think, because it really covers the roads, but it also covers the parks and a lot of other different things. Um, snow and ice. Um, for those folks who aren't aware. Snow and ice is basically the one budget that we are allowed to overspend. And because of the uncertain nature of snow. And so what the what the door does do to us is they say, well, you can't get cute and say, okay, well then I only I only think we'll spend $10,000 on snow removal this year. They basically make it so you have to spend what you you know, what you what your budget or spent the prior year. I think the only time they gave us any kind of leeway was back in 2015 when they said, yeah, you're not going to assume you have that much snow again so that, you know, stays typically level funded, um, or whatever. But, you know, then street lighting is one you're going to see, you know, it's just, you know, we the you know, the budget is clearly has been under, um, you know, we've got a $23,600 budget. I mean, that's what we actually spent, you know, going on two years ago now. Um, so that number that had to be sort of, you know, redone and moved up to a more reasonable number of trash is the, you know, the big one we've been talking about all along. Um, and then cemetery, uh, just a small increase for a little bit of a coma for, um, you know, one person there. Um, so we'll move through this, um, quickly. Um, you know, so one thing I'd like to point out here is, and it kind of goes back to what I said at the beginning, uh, when we sort of like, think about, you know, all, you know, all departments or other departments and not just just our own, but the DPW is a department that I think since I've been here and maybe a little bit before, they've been understaffed. And so when we talk about these free cash numbers, we have, um, the DPW has probably generated, you know, 3 or $400,000 or more of free cash because they've they've had positions that were unfilled, um, that caused us to underspend our budget and therefore generated free cash. And last year, in particular, I think of, um, you know, they were they did not have full staffing. We had a little bit of a winter last year, or at least we had a couple of weeks that were difficult. Um, you know, and Rich and Keith Carter and the rest of the staff over there, they were kind of under fire for the response to some of the snow events. And, you know, I just don't think the average resident understands that. There were times when I think maybe there were two people available to plow and clear sidewalks and, and, and things like that. And so, you know, this is something that, you know, Rich and his department. They've you know, they've kind of managed to muddle through and get things done. But at the same time, they were generating free cash that, you know, turned around and bought capital items for other departments. Um, you know, and I just this is where I feel like folks should be mindful of. Um, you know, I think Rich actually took some, like, unwarranted attacks at town meeting, um, that, you know, he did that so that we could produce free cash that someone else used to buy something. So I like people to sort of think about it through that kind of prism. But, um, so I think we're moving towards having more staffing, um, you know, which is good. I mean, I think, you know, you can. The thing about the DPW is I think you can get by and you can do you know, just enough and you can get by for only so long. But over time, you know, the little things that, you know, you'd like to get to, that you don't get to this this summer and then you don't get to them next summer. Um, you know, that adds up over time. And then certainly during snow season is when you feel, you know, feel it the most. Because if you don't have the staffing levels and you have to deal with the Dot ruling around, you know how much people can be in a truck and all that stuff. You know, two, two guys, three guys is not going to be enough to to take care of a town. And people should definitely be aware of that. Um, overall, you know, salaries are, uh, you know, going up, uh, looks like about 2.6%. Um, this is a little less than the 3% because, largely speaking, the folks that work in the DPW, whether they're actual, like, um, folks out in the field or the administrative assistant, they're all in the AFC union. And so that contract had some different, um, a different approach. And so they, you know, they happen to get sort of some, some wage increase in year one and lower Colas throughout, throughout. Uh, so I think they're more like a 2.5% cola for the year. Uh, so that's why this one comes in a little bit lower than the 3 to 3%. Um, you know. Um, but, you know, you're looking at, you know, whatever, maybe a, you know, $18,000 increase there on the staffing side.

02:24:01,901	S9:
On the expense side. You know, we're level funding here. Um, you know, we've not even really too many sort of changes in terms of, you know, uh, like we had in other departments with the, you know, the electric and the gas or whatever. Um, you know, this is an area where, you know, we don't have a postage anymore. Um, we did move that out at some point in the past. Um, you know, miss, for permitting, uh, that's one that, um, you know, it deals with sort of the stormwater, um, requirements that we have which, which have increased, you know, year over year for several years. And so that's an area where, um, we don't always spend spend that money by the end of the year. But we always encumber it because we're, you know, you just honestly can't get the folks in here to actually do the work by June 30th in a lot of years. But that is a big part of the overall highway budget. And, um, you know, probably a big part of that job is managing, you know, that that, that stormwater, uh, stuff on Rich's, Rich's plate, um, snow and ice. Um, you know, as I talked about, you just kind of level fund it. You can't overspend it if you have to. Um, you know, I think one of the things that's interesting about snow and ice is that, you know, I mean, people think about the plowing and paying guys overtime and things like that, but really the, the, the toughest cost, I think in snow and ice, it's the product that they spread because every time the road is slick or whatever, they've got to be out there spreading, uh, spreading. Well, it's not sand anymore, right? You can just do salt. Um, you know, so anytime there's one, you know, the police make a call and say a certain corner is, you know, icy, you know, they got to roll the trucks out and they got to spread that product. And that just continues to get more and more expensive every year. And it's probably the biggest component of what we spend, which I think most people wouldn't actually think they would think it was for the labor. Um, you know, and as you can see, we have some contracted plow trucks, which is very common, especially for small communities like ours, because, as I mentioned, you just don't have enough, um, you know, bodies to, to be out there plowing an entire town and cover the entire town, and especially in these continuous snowstorms, um, it's challenging for the smaller communities to, to get these folks and harder and harder every year, I think. Um, but that's that's not all that big a part of the budget either. But it's certainly a big component of of how we manage snow.

02:26:26,067	S9:
Street lighting. Yep. Just you know, I talked about a little bit earlier, but yeah, I mean, we were we were budgeting, you know, what we really spent in 24, we were budgeting much less than we spent in 25. So we've just, you know, increased that quite a bit to get it more in line with where, you know, frankly, that could even still be low based on energy prices these days. But, you know, that's an area where, you know, we'd love to be cutting places to to get under that 1.2. But, I mean, you know, the reality is what it is. You can't ignore the fact that that the bill is over $30,000 and you're only budgeting 24. Um, and this is the this is the big one. We obviously talked about it earlier. Um, you know, there's a few, a few different components to to the trash. There is, um, you know, the will of greater trash processing, which we actually, you know, did settle that contract for July 1st of FY 26. Uh, and so there's a big increase in the budget for that. Um, but again, we we thought that could be a 70% increase or something of that magnitude. And it really only ended up being about 19 or 20. Um, and then the Casella at the top, um, that, you know, I think Steve mentioned, I mean, that it's probably not going to be much less, but it could be a little bit more that one is still in flux. Um, we've had, you know, discussions with Casella, uh, in conjunction with, with Hamilton to try to move forward on another joint contract. Uh, we did have discussions with other, um, you know, mainly Republic, uh, to see what, what someone else might charge us. And, you know, honestly, even in our preliminary discussions, they were looking to charge us probably more than Casella would to continue the contract. And they were looking for us to buy split the cost of a new, uh, a new trash truck, uh, and potentially the cost of renting a trash truck while the, the one we needed was being built. Uh, so at this point, I think we're moving forward with the recommendation of just staying with Casella because they know the community. They've done a good job. We don't have the same cost of being forced to buy a new, new machine, um, that we would if we went with someone like Republic. Uh, so that's sort of the course we're on right now.

02:28:36,100	S5:
Yeah. Just to add for the I think the fin com and select board are aware, but we did it for the folks at home. We did form a working group. And I just wanted to make the point clear that with the wheel operator traffic processing that we did move forward with contracting with them last year. It was not done blindly. We looked at pretty much any, any and all alternatives for trash disposal available in our region, and this came out by far and away the most cheapest option.

02:29:06,868	S3:
Can I just make a comment? So fin was mentioning earlier how, um, at the time that we present the budget to the public at town meeting and before, uh, having some kind of regional comparisons, neighboring town comparisons on certain items would be helpful. And those of us that were on the working group that Steve just alluded to know how Unexpectedly low that 19 or 20% um increase is is going to be because we were worried about, you know, 3,040% potential increases based on a whole variety of factors, market conditions and the cost of refuse collection. But I don't know whether the enrich you may know, that's whether there's, um, data that might be available to us, that where we could try to make like an apples to apples comparison with other towns who are renewing and what.

02:30:03,601	S15:
We do have access to other towns contracts. Okay. Um, the apples apples piece is a bit tough because, you know, town exact same size. Is it curbside? Is it? Right. So there's we're pretty close. You know, we have all the towns that we can refer to at the same time.

02:30:20,100	S3:
Yeah, that'd be great. I mean, if we're able to crunch those numbers internally and look at averages or something, and presuming that the numbers come out in a way that, you know, sort of makes the point, it may, um, you know, soften the blow to people when they see that number and think, whoa. And, but and then I understand that it really could have been a lot worse.

02:30:39,767	S15:
It was projected to be.

02:30:41,501	S3:
Yeah.

02:30:42,100	S13:
Yeah.

02:30:43,367	S9:
And I think other communities have experienced that. I know we were a couple of years ahead of when I'm in Essex and we, we same thing. We thought, oh it's going to be 80, 85%. And even though we didn't have curbside, um, you know, relatively speaking, we were experiencing the same thing. It was like, you know, wow, I never thought I would be excited over a 21% increase. But this is fantastic. And I think because Manchester, have they closed yet or are they still looking.

02:31:07,767	S15:
I think there's still I don't think it's anything signed yet. Yeah I'm not sure.

02:31:10,901	S9:
Because I think they're on the same time frame as us.

02:31:13,501	S15:
Um, I think the other piece is previous contracts where all towns were ten year. Now, neither parties are really interested in doing those ten year contracts. So they're the current one that we're discussing would be a five year. Yeah. But, um, no one both sides of the tables, don't want to sign a contract. And, you know, kind of put that liability out for that amount of time. Yeah.

02:31:36,667	S9:
Yeah. And I will say to that the new contracts have all kinds of different variables and escalators and fuel, escalators and different things. You know, they're both Republican. Koslow had all kinds of things in there to protect themselves on all kinds of, you know, downside problems. And that seems to be pretty common across across the space. So, you know, if we look at this, we're, you know, in total we're looking at probably a $95,000 increase here, which is, you know, obviously a big number. You know, that's a big component of the 1.2. But this is an area, as I said earlier, where we're looking at, we could, you know, if it was something that helps us get under the levy limit. You know, we may determine like let's look at using. You know, I don't know, $60,000 of stabilization this year, 40,000 a year after and 20,000 the year after that, to help sort of smooth this out and ease it in over time. Um, you know, obviously, even if we use 60, I mean, that's not solving the whole problem by any stretch. But that was certainly the thinking thought when we pumped all that money into into stabilization that were really two driving factors there. One was to to help transition the trash cost. The other one was potentially to have almost like a bond sinking fund for Cutler to help us address that. If that came to fruition. And it may still I mean, obviously something if the Cutler project didn't go through other things, something else will have to be done at the at the school level to, to address the, the the building needs there. So yeah. So that will, you know, as we work to, you know, sort of chew up these numbers talking, you know, through the rest of the negotiations with Casella. Then we'll, you know, I think with the Finance Committee and the Select board as well, like work on strategies to utilize stabilization as a way to to help make this a little bit more manageable, because I think the key that everybody seem to be focused on is, you know, the residents of Wenham have come to expect, you know, curbside pickup as a, as a, you know, part of their tax bill. And we're all trying to figure out ways to make sure we can continue to provide that service, uh, you know, without any kind of additional fee to the, to the resident, which is certainly an option. I mean, it's under state law, we're allowed to to do that. But I just think, um, you know, everybody agreed we wanted to find a way to take this and keep it to be something that was part of, you know, your tax bill and not an additional charge for something.

02:33:57,000	S9:
Uh, Cemetery. Um, I think, you know, basically flat, um, we're looking at, you know, a very small increase for, you know, the burial agent is getting a 3% cola. But, you know, we've we've sort of left the overtime flat and left the, you know, the stipend, um, flat as well. Um, and that's, that's one of the, you know, the board's and one of I think does a does a really nice job as a bunch of folks on that board who are, you know, very invested in everything to do with the cemetery veterans, all kinds. All that stuff. And so, you know, they do a nice job of, you know, understanding their budget and all the components of it and sort of keeping it on track.

02:34:40,100	S9:
So yeah, level fund on the expense side. Small increase on the salary.

02:34:45,567	S9:
Um, health and human Services. So this is an area, um, you know, where we probably underspend relative, um, to a lot of maybe other communities. Our health department is largely, uh, you know, a volunteer board and then some part time employees or consultants that fill in the gaps. Um, you know, that is, you know, in some part driven by, um, you know, the community and the needs of the community. Um, you know, we don't have, you know, there's not a lot of restaurants, there's not a lot of things that would, you know, maybe require you to have a full time health agent that most communities you know, would have. Um, and so that allows us the flexibility to have a lower expense here where, you know, like Jared brought up, um, you know, talking about the land use department earlier. You know, our land use department is probably a little more robust than a lot of comparable communities. Um, but we're able to do that because we, we sort of spend less in this area. And, you know, I might have even said this to Emma at some point when she asked me a question for the news of, you know, each community is different and they allocate we all have the same challenges. It's just that we allocate our resources in different ways. And this is one that sticks out to me because, you know, we we we had a full time health agent in Essex. We don't have one here yet. We're about the same size community. But the needs of the town are very different. And so, you know, you can get by with what we have here for the health department. But the the focus on conservation and trees and things like that here and Wenham make, um, make, you know, the land use department more, more, more of an important function for this town. Council on aging is the really the biggest component of the of the budget. And then the veteran services, which are largely is just a pass through from a regional veteran services group and then paying paying veterans. So we'll look at that a bit. Um, so, you know, as you can see, um, the.

02:36:45,467	S13:
Um.

02:36:48,167	S9:
The Board of Health, you know, salaries are going up 3% for the Cola. Uh, we're keeping expenses basically flat from the prior year. But you can see we have an animal inspector. We have an assistant health agent. Um, that'd be great, right? Oh, Frank. Right. Yeah. Uh, and then. And then the nurse, um, which is, um. Remember that thing? Yeah.

02:37:10,801	S5:
Um, we say part time. It's very part time. Like, what is a few hours a month, friends?

02:37:16,267	S15:
And, uh, yeah, once a week for a couple, a few hours.

02:37:18,767	S5:
And similarly with Mary Beth Pang is, you know, six, six hours a month, maybe.

02:37:24,667	S15:
Yeah.

02:37:25,968	S9:
Yeah. And I mean, really, the biggest line of the contract services is, I mean, that that would be Greg. That would be, you know, the septic inspections and those type of things. Um, you know, little things. People don't think about it. Just like, just like testing the water at Pleasant Pond, you know, that you have to do that throughout the year, you know, and that, you know, is whatever 80, $90 a pop. Um, you know, the flu clinics and things like that. I mean, I think we do a lot of stuff at a regional level, uh, that help, um, you know, again, can help us get by with sort of less a less robust health department because, you know, there's some regional, um, things that help us out with things like flu clinics and things like that on a more regional, regional nature. Um, so that's health. Um, Council on Aging. Uh, you know, these folks, I think we would all agree to a really nice job over there. You know, it's a really great program. Jim and the staff do a great job, you know, with the residents, uh, make great use of the space that they have. Uh, you know, it's certainly, um, probably not all they would want, but it does manage to, you know, allow them to provide a lot of both indoor and outdoor activities. Um, and for residents and, you know, just very largely, you know, well-received, I think. Um, and, uh, you know, very similar. There's wages going up about 3%. We're keeping, um, we're keeping the, uh, the expenses basically level. Um, one benefit we do have, um, with the Council on Aging is there is a dedicated, uh, formula grant that comes from the state, uh, that does actually help supplement some of the, the things that, that they want to do over there. Um, you know, it's it's never enough, but it does help supplement the things that are, you know, sort of outside the budget. Um, and then, you know, the on the expense side, um, you know, or, well, salary too, I guess. But the van Jim and I were just talking about this the other day. You know, the van service, you know, and they did. They've got a shiny new van, which I think is not yet registered, but sitting over there ready to go, um, you know, they do really do a nice job over there of providing that service to, you know, to a it's, you know, not a huge group of people, but to the to the folks who utilize it. It's probably a really essential service, I would say. And I know Jim's always trying to find ways to expand that service of one of those ways was getting a grant for this new van, uh, which will allow us to run the other one, sort of secondary, uh, and maybe provide a little bit more service. And, um, but yeah, overall, I mean, I think, you know, I haven't talked to Jim, you know, over the last couple of years. I mean, just this is a group that does a really nice job of providing services to residents, you know, to a to a demographic of the town, which, you know, as someone sort of alluded to earlier, you know, probably had kids in the system at some point in time, but that that was a long time ago for many of them. And where that makes, you know, the school makes up such a large portion of their tax bill. Um, you know, this is always an area just, you know, conceptually, I always feel like it'd be great if we could do a little bit more here because this is the the one, you know, most direct service we provide to the seniors in our community is the Council on Aging. And, you know, it's a little disproportionate, if we're being honest. Um, and so, you know, I hope folks would support this, uh, you know, budget moving forward,

02:40:51,067	S9:
uh, veterans, uh, you know, like I said, two parts of it. Um, you know, we get an assessment from the from the district. Um, to, to pay for the administration of veteran services, and then they just run, um, programs. Uh, you know, Memorial Day, Flag Day, the Wreaths Across America, all the all that great stuff that the veterans group does. Uh, and that works out to about a $26,000 budget.

02:41:16,968	S9:
We're getting close here. I think we're going to come close to making that 1130. Uh, culture and rec. Um, really, the big one here is the historic commission, but we also have a library and a joint rec. Um, the library, as I mentioned earlier. And Bob always, you know, points us out to. And it's something when I was thinking of coming over here and I said, well, I'll take a look at the town budget report and said, oh my God, what? I'm spending $1 million in the library. Um, the library runs through Wenham, and it is sort of amazing to me. And Bob and I have joked at this that nobody ever questions that the library is, you know, the cost of the library in our budget booklet is massive because we're paying, even though it's only at like 33% of it is ours. The entire thing is on our book and nobody seems to question it, which Bob has always said, well, people must really like the service because, you know, they're willing to pay 67% more for it than they actually have to. Um, but, you know, the library, obviously the biggest part of this, Hamilton is paying essentially two thirds of that, and not just two thirds of the million one, but also two thirds of the pension carry the health insurance. Um, you know, the Medicare. Um, and then also we allocate a certain amount of administrative expenses. So a little portion of my time, a little portion of Steve's time, um, that type of stuff. So, you know, last year, for example, you know, Hamilton paid us roughly $950,000 towards the library, which sounds great. 950 towards, you know, a million won. Um, but but really, there's a whole lot of other costs that are up on top of that that, you know, you're not seeing reflected there. Um, joint recreation, much like permitting earlier. This is one that, um, you know, we're just trying to get caught up with what the what the budget is. And so I've tried to really build in a big cushion there. Um, you know, because you can see the budget we have for FY 26 is, you know, essentially the same as what we really paid in FY 25. So clearly we're we're off pace. So, you know, I just kind of did a compounded return of about 6.5% from FY 25 to get to where we should be now. Uh, and then the historic commission, we, you know, have this $200 a year budget that last year they somehow spent $7, um, on that. I guess that must have been like a certified mail or something. Um, so, you know, we'll get a little, you know, into the detail here. Um, you know, much like police or fire or much of what gets done at a municipality, you know, most of your expenses are, you know, on the payroll side, but, you know, the library does, you know, they have a lot of sort of, um, requirements they have to meet. So they do spend a little bit more, uh, proportionately, like if you think of, you know, 355 on expenses, there's probably more than, uh, the police spend on expenses, um, because they have these requirements to spend on books and different things to to be part of, you know, under state guidelines and then also to be part of the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium, we have to sort of, you know, carry our weight in terms of putting, you know, because the system allows you to share materials throughout the whole Merrimack Valley. Um, it does. We have to be putting enough, you know, materials into the system that, you know, we're allowed to let our residents borrow as well. Um, but we're going up, you know, like, looks like for a little over 4.5% or close to 4.5% there. Um, on wages. Uh, some of it's, you know, some of that is just driven by, um, contractual things between the directors contract, the union contract, uh, which Steve mentioned. That union contract is coming up, uh, this year. Uh, so we'll have to at some point set aside a little bit of funding for that. Um, but but that's the only open union, uh, negotiation we have right now. Um, so this number, you know, could could change, uh, you know, a little bit based on what? We finally settle on a contract with that final union there. Um.

02:45:20,367	S9:
Kim and I worked, I should Kim worked. I agreed that it looked fine to sort of change up how she does her expenses. And, you know, one of the points she made, which was a good one, was that we had this kind of this lump sum technology budget that it wasn't truly, you know, you know, it made it look like they were spending a ton of money on technology, when in fact, a lot of that money was like what they paid to the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium or whatever. So we can't go back. But moving forward, we will adjust that so that we can, you know, we can see that sort of broken out more appropriately. Uh, you know, and you can see that, you know, we're not spending 60, $70,000 in technology. We're really spending 24, $25,000 on technology, and it's the consortium fees that are really the, you know, the driver there. Um, but overall, uh, you know, I would say this is, you know, pretty consistent with libraries around. I mean, they all whether it's, you know, our bigger joint library or Essex's small library, we all have kind of the same guidelines we have to follow, um, in terms of funding our expenses and things like that. Joint rec, we just covered that, you know, and that is that covers both, uh, use of the, the pool in Hamilton and then all the, the recreation services that are available to, you know, kids, seniors, you know, across the spectrum. Uh, Sean Timmons in Hamilton runs that does a nice job with that program. Uh, and, you know, much like the library, you know, the, the economies of scale of having a joint program with Hamilton, uh, for recreation just allows a much more robust program than a smaller town could, you know, otherwise provide on its own. Uh, so, um, you know, I think when a resident should be, you know, no one likes to see a big increase, but they should be happy with the sort of the products that they're getting out of this.

02:47:10,100	S10:
So is that our one third share or is that like, like the library, that last number, if it's joint.

02:47:16,767	S9:
Uh, off the top of my head, I'm trying to remember it's mainly just assessment driven. I can't totally recall if there's any specific extra driver in there. Like, I think permitting is really the one that's the most sort of intricate in terms of, in terms of how how we do it.

02:47:30,167	S5:
It's just assessed. That's just our assessment.

02:47:34,000	S9:
Yeah, yeah. I think there's a $5,000 premium on your property for the assessment. But beyond that, it's.

02:47:40,667	S10:
Is that why she came and visited? Yeah, yeah.

02:47:44,467	S9:
Uh, historic commission, you know, I think I yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned to you about history, I mean, do they have any interest in potentially changing this budget or, you know, adding to it?

02:47:54,901	S15:
They they probably want about 100 maybe.

02:47:57,000	S9:
Gotcha. Okay. I mean, I guess they have the study right now. So that's probably the largest part of it.

02:48:01,367	S5:
Yeah, that's the one thing that they are in a study right now, which I think is much needed. It was happy to see it get funding was to standardize, um, you know, the rules, regulations, guidelines for the district.

02:48:14,667	S9:
That moves us to debt service. Um, we're in a pretty good position here on debt service. And now there's two parts to this, right? We saw this earlier. There is, you know, about 6 or $700,000 worth of debt we pay through the school, the school district. But on our ledger, you know, we're now down to about $183,000 of debt. And that is actually the represents the last payment on the town hall project. And at that point we we have no we will have no debt on the books. And when them uh, if you recall, in town meeting in April, we utilized free cash to pay off our short term debt, uh, as a way to to reduce future expenditures and utilized free cash. So that wiped out our short term debt back in May. And then this will be the final payment on the town hall debt and will be done. And there is there is a corresponding debt payment out of the community preservation funds as well for the town hall debt. But yeah, as of next year, we've got no debt on our side. Um, you know, that's, you know, not going to hold. Obviously at some point we'll, we'll have to take debt for something, um, potentially even like a solar project at town hall, um, moving forward. But but we're in a pretty good position there. And we're slowly, you know, reducing that down. Um, it's all exempt debt. And so and actually our debt from the, from the school district is exempt as well. Uh, for some reason, I think Hamilton has one piece of the school debt that is not exempt from the from the prop two and a half levy limit, but all of our debt is exempt. And so that, um, that means it doesn't get rolled into the budget that is subjected to the levy limit. It exists outside that levy limit. But that will be gone at the end of this year. Pension and benefits. So we talked about this a little bit earlier. So the retirement you know we're looking at $117,000 $118,000 there. We now know that that really is going to be, you know, much closer to 45 or $50,000. Um, the increase there so that that's, you know, a huge help. But again, only $70,000 change. Um, in the grand scheme of things. You know, it makes a dent, but not a huge one in that $1.2 million, the group insurance. Um, as folks recall, from the town side and also from the employee side, uh, the increases last year from Maya were, you know, almost 20%. Um, we're hearing initial, um, thoughts from them that it could go up another 16 this year. So, I mean, we've already talked about, um, forming, you know, commissions with committees with other towns in the Maya world or, you know, with an internal committee, maybe with employees and and other stakeholders in the town to address with Maya how to how to handle this, because it's, you know, as much as from a budget standpoint, it's it's it's, you know, untenable, you know, for the employees who utilize it, it's it's also a huge change over the last couple of years. So, you know, this one is sort of in limbo. We've built in the worst case scenario to start. But I think there's going to be a lot of work to be done here because it just, you know, this number can't hold for a second a second year in a row.

02:51:34,901	S10:
And, um, a question on that. What, um, where is the retiree medical future liability accounted for within. Are they part of that population as well.

02:51:50,267	S9:
So right now what you would say is, you know, if you think of it for like an OPEC terminology where on a fully pay as you go, um, sort of approach to, to paying for medical. So that number is all active employees and all retired employees are in that case.

02:52:05,667	S10:
Um, as, as we move toward the getting the the OPEC audit this year, I'd like to get a list of assumptions that go into the audit. Um, for example, it's not clear to me, you know, do we require that the retirees, I know, they don't kick into the Social Security system, either the teachers or the municipal employees. But what about Medicare, for example?

02:52:28,901	S9:
So all yeah, well, I shouldn't say all, but pretty much anybody who started at the towns or the schools after like 1968, we all contribute to Medicare. So. Okay. Um, so, um, we, um, that everybody is we don't force active employees on, on onto Medicare type plans, but any retiree who is.

02:52:50,100	S10:
Okay. So that's included in the actuarial assumptions then? Okay. Yeah.

02:52:54,167	S9:
Yeah. You actually. We actually had every year I went through it with Blue Cross. We had one employee in Essex for some reason who wasn't in the Medicare system. It was like a glitch. But he wasn't eligible for Medicare plan because he was never in the medical system. And every year they would be like, this can't be right. You must have messed up. I'm like, no, I the guy is a unicorn. I don't know how.

02:53:12,968	S10:
So whatever we're signing up to for retiree medical, it is assumed that they will obtain whatever Medicare coverage they can obtain. Yeah. Okay.

02:53:23,000	S9:
From an OpEx standpoint. And also Blue Cross comes you know, you they they send an email to the employee or retiree and the town hall, you know, a few months ahead of time, like Blue Cross is kicking you off too. Like they're right. They're telling you it's time to get off the HMO and get on the get on the Maddox plan.

02:53:41,667	S10:
And then when it comes to I know that, um, you know, indirectly, we also have a similar cost from the from the schools because the teachers have their own health. Obviously plans and similar negotiating dynamics. Is there any does? Does the town sit down with the school committee and say, who are you negotiating with and get together? Or has it all done separately or.

02:54:07,868	S9:
Yeah, I mean, we've actually talked about that, about how to consolidate that a bit more. We at Hamilton and Wenham are on the same system. Uh, the school is not, um, the school, I believe. I don't know if they're still on the GSE. They were at one point. Um, but they're also experiencing similar increases in the GIC. Um, you know, they might have had some cost savings that the plans might be a little cheaper, but the increases are similar. Um, so, yeah, I mean, I think.

02:54:33,567	S10:
That they negotiate separately and kick that number into their budget.

02:54:37,000	S9:
Broker. Okay. And negotiate that way versus like, we've used Maia as our third party to negotiate directly with, you know, with Blue Cross for, you know, I don't know how many. 300 communities in the state or something. But yeah, I think all of that stuff is on the table. You know, for this, if we do, in fact, here, um, that, you know, they really do come in at these higher numbers. I mean, Hamilton has heard that. We haven't heard it directly yet. Um, you know, so we'll we'll see what really comes through. Um, I mean, I know in large part the GLP drugs are which was, you know, given is really the main driver last year of the 20% increase. Those are being largely, you know, reduced as of January 1st. So I'm not sure they can use the GLP drugs as a as an excuse this year. So I'm not sure what the driver will be.

02:55:23,868	S10:
So last question on this and coming full circle, I mean, where we say that, you know, we're going to commit to the open trust fund in an amount equivalent to the former pension funding payment or the ADC. By the way, I don't know what ADC is, but um, my point is obviously with the with the current staff of both, you know, the our our employees in the town and the school system. I mean, we have a current contractual obligation under collective bargaining to, you know, to do what we need to do for them. With respect to the census, however, for group insurance. You've got a population that is not part of the collective bargaining agreements, that is this, quote unquote, unfunded liability. And that's why I'd like to see a census breakdown as to, you know, as we get go into these obligations. Okay, who's part of OPEC, which is, yes, we want to do the right thing, but not a contractual obligation. You know, the i.e. what's being signed up here vis a vis. Yes, we want to do the right thing and we have a contractual obligation with our current employees. I think it's going to be I think we need to see that information in some form so that as the OPEC liabilities are developed again to fund this supposed draft policy that we're going to sign up for. I'd like to see that information.

02:56:47,901	S9:
Yeah, I can redact our census info for you to show it to you. And you know what you're describing. It has definitely been talked about in other communities I've been involved with. Um, you know, you always, as you say, want to sort of want to do the right thing, um, for your retirees. Um, you know, in a large part, a lot of them worked when you didn't pay as much and whatever. So that health insurance benefit was really what they were working for. So you're very hesitant to to pull the plug?

02:57:13,200	S10:
Oh, absolutely. Which is why.

02:57:15,067	S9:
Time it is when you're looking at what am I?

02:57:17,067	S10:
But we want to go into it with a full deck of cards as to what is it? Are we we have a draft policy. Okay. But what does that actually mean in dollars and cents potentially on a go forward basis. And I've never seen that laid out before, you know, for the town or for the schools.

02:57:32,100	S9:
I can send you the report and the census I just have to make. I did actually have specific people's names and things like that on it that I'd have to redact, but I can I can show you that, um, the last, you know, thing underneath group insurance, FICA, Medicare. That gets back to what Jared was just talking about. We do pay. Um, we don't the the town does not pay social security. The town uses a system called obra. So if if for those of you that you know are in the private world, you know, you pay a Social Security amount and your employer pays the other half of it. You know, you each pay 6.2% into the social security system. Municipalities, you know, in the state of mass are allowed to take a different approach. And we use obra, which means we don't make a social security contribution. Instead, the employee makes a contribution of I think it's 8 or 9% into an Obra account. If they're a part time worker, which is essentially it operates like a regular retirement account or an IRA almost. And it's their funds. So part timers on one hand, aren't getting the benefit of accruing Social Security benefits, but at the same time, they have their own little independent account.

02:58:38,968	S10:
Well, how does that work for the full time?

02:58:40,701	S9:
So full time is there in the pay. Anybody who's a full timer, who's in the pension system is exempt from Social Security and they just pay.

02:58:46,167	S10:
Which is why it's very important to keep the pension up because the employees didn't contribute. I think Massachusetts is one of ten states that for some reason, decided they weren't going to be in Social Security. I, you know, yeah.

02:58:59,300	S9:
I don't know what the I mean, it goes back a long time, but, um. Yeah.

02:59:02,868	S10:
Steve 1735 I.

02:59:05,267	S9:
Checked it so that we can, you know, at least the folks are putting in a much higher percentage share into the system. It's still, um, it's clearly not. I mean, when, you know, when folks say, oh, well, now we're fully funding, um, you know, and that's not the case. You're not putting, you know, 11% into your, into your, um, pension system. If you were to put that into a 401 K, it would not guarantee you potentially 80% of your, um, your final, you know, three years of salary or whatever. But we're doing a lot more than we were. You know, I think my stepdad worked for the state, and I think he contributed like 3% or something. Um, so so that's changed over time. But so FICA is is not really a thing for us, but Medicare is. And so we're paying the, you know, our half of the 1.45% of Medicare for every single person who works for the town full time or part time. Um, and that's one that, you know, we adjusted that up a little because we just, you know, you can see again, it's another one of those where we budgeted less within FY 25 actuals actually came in at. Um, this is we kind of talked through this, uh, our general insurance fund. I reduced that a little. Um, you know, maybe this is a place where we can find a little bit more, but, um, you know, as we're doing, you know, more and more things and having more park space and having more vans for the Koa and whatever the general insurance is, is, you know, heading up, not down. But we've definitely had a little cushion built in there. So we're trying to adjust for that. Uh, the final line on the town side is the PEB just going up to 10% again. And that moves us to our final piece, the water department. Um, and, you know, this has a larger than normal increase, you know, almost entirely driven by the fact that the water commissioners have voted to increase the typical $35,000 that they put into a capital reserve account. They're now going to raise $50,000, you know, moving forward. So that's that's really the biggest driver here. And that's not really something that has to be, you know, raised on the tax rate, but it is raised on the water rate. And I think you folks have just adjusted water rates. Right. Um, and and so but you know, this is I think generally speaking, the water department has done a really good job of sort of forward planning. Uh, whether it's for setting aside capital reserves, whether it's setting aside money to deal with the PFAS issue. Uh, you know, then we've had received the windfall of the PFAS settlement that the water commissioners have already started to use to start planning for how we're going to, you know, address the PFAS issues, uh, here in Wenham. Um, but really, you know, you're looking at pretty much 3% increases for the non-union staff, 2.5% increases for the the union staff. Um, and, you know, largely the budget itself is, you know, basically flat other than the the increase I just mentioned on the capital funding. Um, and that that concludes our first look at the FY 27 budget.

03:02:09,467	S12:
Jeff, sorry, can you just mentioned PFAS, which is another thing that we talked about using the stabilization fund and why we established the stabilization fund. Is that an issue that we don't anticipate having to address, you know, capital needs or the the structure of of PFAS abatement, uh, in this FY 27.

03:02:28,267	S5:
Specifically PFAS, right? Yeah. No, not nothing this year. But I mean, we're. We're in a number of working groups with a number of communities in the state. And, um, and uh, we're looking at, uh, you know, basically any, every, any and every option under the sun on how we're going to handle moving forward, whether it's tying into Beverly, Salem water board, uh, water supply, whether it's merging with Hamilton, whether it's building our own treatment center, it's, you know, because, um, but no, nothing this year. But, I mean, there there is likely going to be something coming down the pike, but it also will likely be incorrect me of a run. Our majority would be funded through ratepayers. It would be presented separately from the operational budget.

03:03:18,000	S12:
Okay. Thank you.

03:03:20,467	S9:
And that actually just does raise one interesting point. Um, so water, while we look at it as part of the overall operating budget for the year, it is actually not part of what we call the general fund. It is a special revenue fund. And it is it is fund. It is funded by rate paying on the water bills. And one of the things that gets a little bit, um, you know, you just have to be careful with is using general fund money, which the stabilization fund is to fund non general fund things that are supported by, you know, sort of rate users or whatever. It's not disallowed but it's something that folks do focus on. Um you know Eric actually like compared to Essex like some much more a much larger percentage of Wenham is on Wenham water than Lake Essex. Right? Yeah, yeah. So in Essex it's a big deal because there's, there's hundreds of houses that don't use water, town water. And so when you talk about using stabilization funds to reduce the the water rate, those people say, hey, wait a minute. Like why already pay high taxes and I don't use the water, and now you're taking my money, um, and using it for, for for water. I don't know how how I feel about that. And, you know, one of the things you usually say is, well, you might not use it, but the school uses it, the town hall uses it. There's lots of government functions that use the water. So it is appropriate to use some amount of stabilization, you know, to help mitigate those costs. Um, you know, and then, you know, obviously water is a key component of any community. I'm certain. You know, I'm sure that people in Flint, Michigan would argue it. You know, it's it's incredibly important. So using general fund dollars is certainly a viable alternative, but it is something that can be up for debate.

03:05:06,400	S9:
I think.

03:05:06,767	S15:
That's.

03:05:07,367	S9:
That's all I got.

03:05:07,968	S16:
Great job Jeff. Thank you. Yeah. So just just to wrap it up great. Great job Jeff.

03:05:13,667	S5:
But, uh, you know, I just want to, you know, thank you guys for the, the boards and staff for coming out on a Saturday morning. It's, you know, it's really important that we get this information out there. Um, and, you know, really, it's, you know, it's your community. And I think, you know, the staff. Staff showing up here today, like our goal is really to try our best to deliver the community you want. So your feedback and your willingness to spend three hours with us on a Saturday morning, you know, says a lot. So thank you for that. And also thank you, Jeff, for, you know, he worked hard with the department heads and clearly put a lot of work into putting this PowerPoint presentation together today. And, you know, he's been a huge asset here at the town particularly, um, you know, the ability to go through the the budget on such a granular level. And also just his, you know, his experience and background, the ability to editorialize and kind of speak from the side of the table with his experience there. So it's always helpful for me to internally to kind of, you know, sometimes get, you know, reality check if you want to call it that. Uh, you know, the way folks are looking at the budget and, you know, it's helpful to, to, to me and everybody really when we're making decisions and trying to move forward. So thank you, Jeff.

03:06:27,267	S10:
Thank you.

03:06:29,100	S3:
All right. Um, thank you very much. And thank you to all the department heads and the staff and all the hard work that went into this many, many hours and a lot of attention to detail. Um, so, um, thank you. And I would entertain a motion to adjourn the select board meeting time. Is it 1136?

03:06:47,000	S7:
1136. So moved.

03:06:49,100	S2:
Second.

03:06:49,868	S7:
Gary. Yes. Peter. Yes, Deirdre.

03:06:52,000	S3:
Yes. And Ben is. Yes. We're adjourned.

03:06:54,567	S7:
Thank you. Cheers.

03:06:55,667	S12:
So, same thing on the, uh, when I'm final advisory, I'm looking for a motion to adjourn. We got a motion. Need a second? Should we? All right. And, uh, any discussion? Not hearing any discussion. We'll move to a vote on votes.

03:07:08,667	S7:
I Jared I.

03:07:11,000	S12:
For votes for. So we are adjourned as well. Thank you very much.