Shutesbury Finance Committee

Minutes from 1/21/2003 meeting at Town Hall

APPROVED MINUTES

 

Present:  Chair Eric Stocker, members Al Beswick, Nancy Beswick, Narda Wakoluk, and Steve Hasbrouck (recording minutes).  David Ames was there.

 

We started the meeting at 7:08 PM.

 

            We reviewed the minutes from 1/7/2003.  We passed them unanimously with one amendment.  We reviewed the minutes from 1/14/2003.  We passed them unanimously as is.

            Eric gave us an update on the idea of refinancing the town loans.  Basically, the answer is that it is not cost effective to do it before November, 2005.  The cost of refinancing would outweigh the savings we would get in interest.  We will try to remember to visit this again at the later date.

            Eric also reported that the letter the Finance Committee sent to the Roads Committee and the Selectboard suggesting we not really proceed forward with the project until the whole town gets to weigh in on it has been received favorably by some of the people in town.  Eric said he has received many e-mails applauding the letter.

            The Personnel Committee is looking for a Finance Committee member to join in the Police Chief’s contract negotiation.  Nancy Beswick volunteered.

            The group assembling to look into health insurance for retirees and draw together information to present to the town is looking for a Finance Committee member to join it.  Narda Wakoluk has volunteered to join that group.

            Bruce Ecker is attending the Union 28 meeting January 23rd in which they will vote on the budget.  He knows our town’s party line, that we are advocating no raises for any town employees and we feel there should not be any raises in the Union 28 offices, either. 

            At this point, Frank Bartucca, from the Gaudette Insurance Agency out of Whitinsville, MA, made a presentation to us outlining three different plans for covering the police and firefighters in town.  Since these workers are not covered by workmen’s comp and we discovered how low our current coverage is, David Ames arranged to have Mr. Bartucca come and make a presentation.  Just as Mr. Bartucca started his presentation, Walter Tibbetts, the fire chief, joined us to listen in.  Two handouts were given out, one defining terms and the other presenting the three plans.  We currently offer $10,000 of medical coverage for about $1,700 worth of annual premium.  The most expensive plan Mr. Bartucca presented, plan 6, offered ten times the coverage for only three times the premium.  After listening to his presentation and having our questions answered and after Mr. Bartucca left, we voted to put plan 6 in the budget.  This was the plan that offered the most coverage.

            We next turned our attention to the FY 03 report we had from David Kielson.  David Ames answered a lot of our questions.  As for why the motor vehicle excise tax revenue was down, David said $100,000 worth of bills were to go out by the first of February.  This would make this line item just about hit its mark.  David knew of no extraordinary reason why building permit revenue were down so they may stay below expectations.  Not all the investment revenue  may have made it onto the report David made and investments are still performing poorly.  We expect that this year’s cuts in local aid will short us $ 36,000+.  We are hoping to have $ 25,000 left in the Fin. Comm. reserve line to help offset this.  Historically we have come out of recent years with $100,000 more in free cash.  Due to some large back tax collections we may be able to do that again this year.  This will offset the cuts from the state for FY 03 and we will be counting on this money as we go into FY 04.

            Before we moved onto looking at FY 04 budget, David asked us to transfer $1,000 from the Fin Comm to the elementary school to bolster the rafters in the gym.  We approved the request unanimously.

            We spent the remainder of the meeting trying to clearly state the worst case scenario for the FY 04 budget.  David Ames had presented a budget that showed a 10% reduction in local aid, and the budget requests as submitted by the elementary school, a 6.3% increase, and the regional, a 18.8% increase.  Using these assumptions, there is a shortfall of $ 443,982.  To this we added $17,000 because the regional budget is NOT counting on a 10% reduction in local aid and $50,000 because we may have to cover the costs ourselves of transporting all our students.  This raises the shortfall to $511,000.  If we use $200,000 of free cash to offset the shortfall we would still have 15% of our expenses between the remaining free cash and stabilization fund.  This leaves a shortfall of $311,000.  We would need to raise the tax rate up to $23.80 to cover this amount.  After coming up with these figures we decided it would behoove us to get other schools in the region to consider voting down the regional budget.  This is where a lot of the increased expense is coming from and it seems to be the place where we have the best chance of making significant reductions in expenses.  We will still try to meet with our town departments.  Eric volunteered to write letters to other towns in the region, much as he did last year with Union 28, asking them to join us in voting down the budget as presented.

            We scheduled our next meetings.  There is an All Boards meeting on January 28th.  We will have a meeting after that meeting to touch base.  We will then have meetings on February 4th, March 4th, and March 18th.  We voted to adjourn at 9:55 PM.

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

 

Steve Hasbrouck