Shutesbury Finance Committee
Minutes from 4/8/2003 meeting at Town Hall
APPROVED MINUTES
Present: Chair Eric Stocker, members Al Beswick, Nancy Beswick, Rita Farrell, Narda Wakoluk, and Steve Hasbrouck (recording minutes). Guests were Tim Hunting, Charlie Bray, Steve Banash, Bruce Ecker, Ellen Vivian, Marianne Jorgensen, Patrick Callahan, Becky Torres, David Ames, and Leslie Bracebridge.
We started the meeting at 7:08 PM.
We reviewed the agenda for the evening. Tim Hunting from the Highway Department is due in first, Charlie Bray, the Police Chief is due in around 7:30, and the school representatives are due in around 8:00. Tim arrived in a timely fashion.
This was our first meeting with Tim about his budget. The most important item to note is that we cut his Gravel Road Upgrade to $0. Our thinking is that there was still money left over in the Gravel Road account from the $120,000 the town designated for working on gravel roads. Some of that money has been spent on Montague Road but there is still $109,929 left over. Tim understands our position. He has projects lined up for the upcoming year. He said he could live with that for this year.
He mentioned that one of his workers is moving onto Leverett for more pay. This guy performed a lot of machinery maintenance. If they cannot hire someone with his skill levels at repairs, Tim may need to get more money for maintenance.
We then approved the minutes of the April 1 meeting with one change.
We reviewed the Capital Planning’s list. There was:
$5,000 for technical upgrades at the elementary school;
$1,000 for installation of windows at the school;
$2,500 for moving some walls in the school;
$2,500 for installation of maps and screens in the school;
$3,000 to pump the septic tank at the school;
$1,800 for a sander attachment for the tractor at the school;
$1,200 for outdoor hose hookups at the school;
$1,500 for sidewalk work at the school; and
$4,000 for a plow for the new highway truck.
We may be getting more information on some of the school items.
At 7:45 Charlie Bray came in. We had level funded the salaries for the police. Charlie assured us that this would not require any police officers working less hours per week. We thought they might have to drop three hours off one of the officer’s week but Charlie didn’t think so. Charlie pointed out that when an officer goes to court it is overtime according to the union contract. Since we don’t have any money budgeted to pay this cost the officer would get paid this time as comp time. Since we don’t have any money for Charlie to hire temporary fill-ins/part-timers the town would be short coverage when the officer takes comp time. We thanked the chief for his time.
The people from the school came. Steve Banash, Bruce Ecker, and Helen Vivian came to talk about the elementary school budget. Marianne Jorgensen joined us later. The SES budget is $1,384,766. We had asked them to cut it by $100,000 compared to last year and they were still about $52,000 short. They told us that they will fund pre-school on their own, not asking any money from the budget. It was pointed out that they have a line called Contingency for $37,000. This was in case the negotiations resulted in raises for the teachers. The Union 28 people are getting raises and the regional teachers are getting their contractual raises so a contingency line was added. The school committee didn’t want to have the override positioned as needed because of the regional assessment. There was talk about how to phrase the override so education wasn’t “blamed”. Marianne said Gus Sayer, the regional superintendent, was looking into changing the formula for the assessment. If his proposal goes through, our rise in assessment would drop from 18% to around 7 – 8%. The other smaller towns in the region would have similar rises, in the 7 – 8% range, and Amherst would take the brunt of the increase. This would mean a savings of over $100,000 for Shutesbury. We talked of having a continuance of the Town Meeting and vote on the town’s budget once more information came in. Al said he was in favor of delaying voting on the budget until later. Although one Select board member seemed pretty set against delaying the vote, it would be up to the town at Town Meeting. Leverett plans to do a recess until the first week in June.
We reiterated we wanted them to look at trimming the budget by $57,000 more. Talk about limiting the outside use of the school came up. Could we delay the pay raises by setting the money aside? (The answer on that one appears to be no.) We talked about the warrant pertaining to the Special Education money. The phrase limiting it to “out of district” expenses seemed an unnecessary stricture and it would serve the child better not to limit it. Since the money would be voted on by the Finance Committee, they will have a say in how it is spent. It was suggested it would be hard to sell an override with so much money in our free cash and stabilization fund. We told them we would talk with the Select Board about not isolating the regional assessment as the reason for the override and we would let them know that the regional assessment may be getting reconfigured. We thanked the folks for coming to meet with us.
We were joined by David, Patrick, Becky, and Leslie.
We told the Board that we are proposing rewording the override. We didn’t want to isolate the school aspect. We mentioned the assessment may be getting reconfigured. That led into talking about delaying the vote on the budget. Pat said he was ok on rewording the warrant on the override issue. There is a plan to meet with Pelham on April 9th to coordinate our towns’ efforts concerning overrides. As our talks continued, the prospect of using more free cash to offset the deficit came up. It actually seemed to gain a measure of support. It was pointed out that Shutesbury has a history of spending down its free cash before going to an override. The idea of using both free cash and an override got floated as well. It was decided that we would need to wait to decide on how to make up the shortfall once we knew more clearly what that shortfall would be. To ready ourselves for our meeting with Pelham, we agreed to say that we are thinking about delaying our budget vote and that we are thinking of possibly using free cash or a combination of free cash and an override to fund our shortfall. The meeting adjourned at 10:40.
Respectfully submitted,
Steve Hasbrouck