Farmington Town Council Budget Workshop - 3-9-22

001[Music] the town of farmington respecting history planning the future council meeting yeah we'll start at brian you'll say pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the blood of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice okay we will begin the evening with public comment we will ask anyone who has any questions or comments to come to the podium state your name and address please try and keep your comments to five minutes we'll begin with those in attendance here in the council chambers if we have anyone who would like to make public comment seeing none yeah do we have anyone online for public comment nope no public comment online and we will get right to it uh item d yes i'd like

002to make a motion to consider and take action the proposed 2022-2023 budget second promotion a second kathy so did you want to just kind of go through the schedule tonight so as you can see we have the board of education here so they'll start they'll come up to the table below and we have them slotted for about an hour then from there we have our department heads that are going to come in we're going to take a break for dinner but we do just so you know we do have economic development is going to be giving a presentation and the library will be giving a presentation and then we'll have all the other department heads come through and we're going to try to go get through all the town side of the budget and we're

003slotted to stay until nine o'clock tonight and typically we do not take any action on any items when we go through the items in the um we'll be working off your budget book so i hope everyone has their budget books with them and we tentatively approve things and then if there's any questions that we want to come back to particular items or pages we usually take a tally of those and then we come back to them closer to the end of the session does that work for you okay good okay all right so i'll turn it over to the board of education please join us at the table here welcome to the podium [Music] um good afternoon uh thank you town council for having us uh here before you as you know we're here to

004present the board of education fiscal year 2022-2023 budget we believe it represents our commitment to both you and the citizens and students of farmington to put forward a fiscally responsible budget that meets our needs we're happy to take any questions this afternoon and with that i'll give you uh superintendent kathy greater [Music] so i'm happy to be with you this afternoon once again and as a reminder our total uh budget request for 2022 2023 a 74 million 448 257 with a 2.99 increase over the 2021-2022 budget we will go section by section through the budget book we'll also reference some of the slides just to give you another look at particular budget drivers within uh this budget so i'm going to turn this over to assistant superintendent for finance and operations alicia bowman and she

005will introduce each section and then once she introduces the section we'll open up to any questions within that section great all right good afternoon um you know you had the opportunity to preview our the board's budget um yesterday and now i'll walk you through the budget book in greater detail section by section the opening pages of the budget booklet include the superintendent's budget message which i gave you an updated letter this evening so that was what was um at your table that serves as a summary of our strategic and collaborative approach to the budget process including the alignment of our budget priorities to district goals and commentary on our budget drivers next you'll see the agendas outlining the structure of our meetings and then the first tab if you go to the introduction tab that

006includes the chart of the budget summary as compared to the 2122 budget a pie chart that visually presents the breakdown of our budget by percentage of each object outline of our budget development philosophy which is guided by our core documents and lastly in the intro section you find our 2022-2023 budget summary then each budget section following the introduction is rolled up into a larger bucket or object so i'll provide an overview of each of the six sections salaries benefits services supplies equipment and dues and fees so we're going to start with the salaries tab so if we if you want to open that one up thanks matt so the first budget driver is salaries this accounts for 66 of the total budget as you can see the beginning page of each section shows the pie

007chart illustrating the percentage of the total budget that's dedicated to that particular object the budget increase in the salary line is 6.4 or sorry 3.46 overall and reflects all negotiated contractual obligations this series reflects each association's salary increases for the coming year which are highlighted on this slide do you have any questions on this section of the budget looks like we're good okay we're going to flip to the next section the second budget driver is benefits which accounts for 16 of the total budget the budget increase in the benefits line is 0.93 percent overall and provides a hundred percent of the expected claims and administration of our employee health insurance all associations within the farmington public schools have a high deductible hsa with co-insurance this series also includes workers compensation unemployment insurance fica medicare and

008other contractual benefits like life long-term disability and retirement contributions do you have any any questions about this section of the budget booklet see now okay we'll flip to services the third budget driver is services which accounts for 14 of the total budget the budget increase in the services line is 2.4546 overall and reflects a variety of essential services for our school including uh consultation services and outplace tuition costs for special education major facility projects utilities k-8 summer school programs core applications and systems for our district technology operations student transportation and professional development programs any questions about the services section of the budget three for three are you timing me all right we're going to move to supplies um supplies section accounts for 2.6 of the total budget the budget increase in the supply line is

0093.98 overall and reflects the facility rentals for athletics in addition to a wide range of instructional supplies health custodial computer testing uh supplies textbooks library books av and computer materials just to note this proposal also reflects a reinstatement of funding from budget reductions any questions about the supply section was the increase on that one the increase in that one is a 3.9 all good okay we'll move on to the next section which is equipment the fifth section is equipment that accounts for half percent of the total budget the budget increase in the equipment line is 30.25 percent overall and reflects facility and technology equipment this series also experienced major reductions in our 2122 budget and this proposal reflects a rest restoration of funding for 2022-2023 any questions regarding equipment i do have one joe thank

010you sure uh just so obviously last year we had everybody at home one-on-one computers how did our system hold up for all everybody being on the system at once do we have a lot of breakdowns with the children with their with their personal computers at home i mean i don't want to speak to that i can tell you my perspective we were able to provide device school issue devices to all k-12 students we did have a number of high school students that chose not to take advantage of that and did use a personal device our repairs are up given the fact that we've got more devices in circulation um we were able to use so2 funding last year which was part of that reduction to help bolster the purchase of additional devices this year we're

011looking to utilize sr3 funding to help with that as well so but overall the performance of the machines that are bandwidth everything was uh accommodated all of the students throughout the district great and um i know that families are provided the opportunity to buy insurance in case something happened did a lot of families take advantage of it or i find that some slipped through the cracks and uh so we are percentage-wise we really didn't increase in the amount of families that took advantage of the insurance there is enough there to cover annual repair costs and anytime we have a family that has a broken device or there's an issue with with a student's chromebook we work with the family individually whether they've bought insurance or not we're still working with them the insurance is there

012to cover them should it be a major damage um and we've had a couple of them that that have a major damage and we we do always offer the the family the option to purchase the insurance even if they hadn't done it at the beginning of the year great thank you very much other questions on equipment okay okay and our um final section is dues and fees which accounts for um three or point three or three tenths of a percentage of the total budget and an increase of two point five three percent this section includes memberships to professional organizations liability automotive and property insurance any questions about this section of the budget i thought that was going to be all the questions right there there's an increase or i have a minus two point five

013uh yeah i am a decrease of sorry of two point five three percent um and that decrease also reflects um the movement of um one of our programs into the proper account but that's what accounts for that decrease and then in the back of the budget booklet following the the six major sections you'll find other supporting budgetary documents which include our capital budget request we presented to the town council on february 22nd federal and state grants enrollment reports and some comparative data with other districts in the state um also uh other districts in our durg or district reference group and then also salary schedules for um our various associations are there any other questions i have a question thanks everyone for coming on this snowy day so we were talking last night about arpa funding

014and esser funding um and for the folks who are not following along but maybe reading this later um can you explain what those are and the difference if there is one between esther and arpa sure so um arp esser was the latest amount of that's okay grant funding that was given to us and the arp stands for the american rescue plan there are five priorities under which or categories which you can apply for funds under that grant and so the the five categories are learning acceleration academic renewal and student enrichment family and community connections social emotional and mental health of students and staff strategic use of technology staff development in the digital divide and building safe and healthy schools though the this grant we had to apply for over the summer it is a grant

015that has to be post it has to be posted on our website i don't know if you know but we had to get community feedback on how we were proposing to use the funds and we have to continue to get feedback on that every six months so if we make any changes or adjustments to our plan we post it and then we also solicit community feedback and input on how we're using the funding as a district we have a strategic long-term plan all of the funds have been accounted for actually the group that's here with me is is really the team we meet regularly to review you know what our funding plan is and and how it's going i don't know if you want more specifics in terms of like the next the next level

016of no okay just i think a lot of folks are a little unclear so we've talked as a council about the arpa funding and what those um funds could be used for so uh the town council on the ad-hoc committee is thinking about a larger capital project and yesterday the the esser versus arpa fund um issue came up because we were talking about the ventilation systems that we're thinking about putting in schools and the specific question johnny and i were you know batting around like well why couldn't we use that funding uh for that project like this year instead of next year and i understand that the issue is a little more complex than that it's not only the funding but it's also the supplies that we wouldn't be able to get anyway this year

017so um i think a lot of parents with you know especially in the lower elementary schools you know it gets really hot come may and then especially you've got like the kids with the red cheeks and the matted down hair so like practically speaking that would be a fantastic way to get those funds directly to do what we need to for the schools so i think that there was kind of like a meta question of like could we get those funds sooner um but maybe you can explain a little bit about how the arpa funds our s were used in this specific budget to kind of sort of decrease our tax burden like overall sure so um some of the ways that we've used this funding to offset the budget would that be helpful um

018we've used it for staffing reasons like specialized reading teacher we've used it for transition programming we've used it for numerous consultations and program reviews health supplies custodial supplies textbooks online curriculum enhancement and like remote learning enrichment programs it helped us with additional summer school programming and student support that was necessary due to remote learning additional mental health supports technology equipment licensing and software so a lot it is a lot um i'm not sure if we mentioned this last time but there we recently received communication from the state that um they're the governor is looking at funding for other additional hvac programs and grants that districts may be able to apply to there's not a lot of detail on it yet but that's something that's definitely being talked about as well okay and then when that

019funding so the rpser i'm gonna mature that for another couple of that's okay go around um so that funding is for the next two years it's for the next three years like how is that how long do we have that funding for another good question um so that funding extends to the fall uh a summer of 2024. okay so there's still another couple of years okay all right thank you for all that information you're welcome all right other questions seeing none um is there anything else you all would like to add this is um uncharted territory i think uh it's you know i'll just make a statement i think all of us who were actively lobbying for the passage of the high school were very clear in saying we did not want to see any

020budgets with the tax increase above 3 percent and uh you all came in below that which i tremendously appreciate i'm sure the town appreciates that um and i think uh you know we we've all seen that we uh i think that made tonight a little faster than it may have otherwise it's not our job to question how you're spending the money it's simply our job to say this is the budget you have this year and you came in with a very good and very fiscally conservative budget and as such it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot for us to ask you tonight so thank you thank you yeah thank you so much thank you thank you thank you and we will let you know if we have questions yeah hopefully uh kathy blonsky's out

021there somewhere and okay we're gonna take like a two minute break from the council just for the reporting okay it is uh 4 26 we will be resuming our budget hearings all right so we're all going to be working off our book and we're going to start um at the beginning at general administration which is the yellow tab so the general administration group of accounts has a 0.26 percent increase some things to note in uh this account this is again our general government it's the uh town manager finance the town council's account personnel town clerk economic development planning and zoning public buildings and insurance one of the reasons the major reason why this account is at the 0.26 percent is because some of you remember last year we had the extra pay period in the

022budget and that extra pay period is gone so we were able to take that money out so that in general has helped the town side of the budget because of that so um in general the rest of the accounts are relatively flat there is some increases we found increases in software and some technology and those types in the finance area which is assessors and tax the registrar voters who are not coming tonight but they're part of it they're they do have an increase and that's because of the extra elections that they're going to have so there's some increases in for them um in the personnel services account if you some of you remember is that when the collective bargaining agreements are not settled we put a lump sum of money in the personnel account and

023then when the agreements are settled they get moved into the accounts so we have last year none of the i think none of the accounts were settled none of the unions right so there was a large sum of money in the personnel account this year there's only two that aren't settled so that's why the personnel services account has gone down but that where that money is is in the individual accounts in the individual departments so that's the point when we hit departments and it's a raise that had to do with that i'm sorry i can't hear you so when we hit different departments you'll point out if that's where some of the money or the increase it was yeah well you can you'll be able to see it because if you look like in the

024highway and grounds they're they're settled so their personnel account in the highway and grounds you'll see that their number is probably a three or four percent increase and compared to when we talk about the police department because they're not settled their money is here their increase is like in the personnel account is like a one or two percent it's because the salaries are in the personnel here so that's what the difference is did i misspell yeah that may not occur uh the two union contracts that are not selled are police and fire so it's our largest one of our largest units one of our smallest unions so those salaries their increases are in the salary reserve afscme and scau are in the departments for next year you may not see it in some departments because

025what kathy alluded to with the 27th pay period that 27th pay period um when you take it out of the departments for next year it actually some departments won't have a substantial increase you're going to have an increase but it's going to be offset by that 27th paper not being there next year gotcha thank you and the library is part of this but they're going to come separately so the the budget pages um for the general administration are budget pages 1 through 25 and typically if you have any specific questions on any of those uh pages i'd be more than happy to answer those okay so give you all a minute to review your notes and see if you have any questions on pages one through twenty five [Applause] and i'm trying to find the

026exact page but um on the the first page here the the planning and zoning um being up uh 23 could you provide a little bit more insight into what's driving that yes i can and hold on i wrote it down learning and zoning so what happened there is that we've we've moved a position into the in there so if you look on page 18 cat help me out here if you look on page 18 the the narrative page you'll see there that we went zoning enforcement development specialist you went from point five to zero and then if you go to page 54 go to page 54 we went zoning enforcement development specialist 0.5 to zero so all we really did is that we took money out of the engineering department and we moved it into

027the planning and zoning department so it's no new change of anything it's just a um just a swapping because the position got changed gotcha and is is another driver the the fact that we're um gonna have a we have a senior assistant town planner as well whereas we didn't have that before that was the um that was the zoning enforcement development specialist position so basically what you're getting in this in this budget is you're gaining a half a position that's one of the drivers the other driver in this department is that three out of the four physicians are sciu positions so you're also getting three years worth of sorry two years worth of salary increases this is one of those departments where you would see the salary increases more notably than most departments because it's

028three um three seiu positions all of their contracts are settled for next year so you have this year's budgeting salary increase next year's salary increase in the department itself so you gained a half a position plus you gained the raises this area the development area is a little bit confusing because we've had some we've done some restructuring we've had some promotions we've changed positions around based on staffing so money's been moved in and out out of different things so again what the drivers are is that we did add a half a position correct it was added half a position and that's really what the only driver is the rest of it's just moving the money around got it makes sense thank you okay and that half position i believe you just described uh is a

029half position that basically came out of engineering because there was a half position over there that was zoning enforcement development specialist yes that position was split between two different budgets of engineering so that's totally in this budget and the reason why if you want to know why we do that is because it's actually what their function is and so like if you if you work our building inspector also is our development inspector so the development inspector budget is engineering the building inspector budget's building so that's why they split positions so if they don't split positions anymore and that's what we've done we've made some changes the whole salary goes into the appropriate accounts great okay other questions on those first 25 pages okay it looks like we're good second tab so usually we have a

030ta for pages one through twenty five all right make a motion to generally approve pages one through twenty five of the budget second we have a motion a second for tentative approval any questions all in favor post motion pass unanimously i think our next one is going to be page 14 and that's uh rose ponte our economic development director good afternoon everyone nice to see you um so throughout this past year um if you look at my budget i pretty much make a policy to keep it flat i think that's pretty important to be able to make sure that all my expenses are tied directly to my goals so anything that you see in that budget is really tied directly to uh the goals that are in the strategic plan and also my department goals

031what i usually like to do during this budget presentation is really to talk a little bit about what is happening in farmington and we always like to say that farmington is the economic leader in the hartford region but i like to look at some data to make sure that that data proves what we say and so of the 29 towns and cities in the in the hartford area in the hartford region farmington has a fourth lowest mill rate at 28.81 we stand behind windsor locks which is now at 25.83 heartland which is at 27 and suffield which is at 28.64 still very good because not all of those towns are able to deliver the type of services we deliver so i think that's a very important indicator that we're being fiscally responsible so our commercial

032base really contributes a very important amount to the tax base they are at 32.3 percent which really means that the entire burden um that is a tax burden is not carried on by our residents it's also an indication of a very thriving business community i thought it would be interesting to see because sales of residential homes have been flying joe you probably know that you've been busy i'm sure so um our medium residential sale sale price at this point is at 458 000 and our medium household income for a family is at 93 053 nationally that number is 62 843 so we're quite a bit higher than the national number and the individual household income for farmington is 47 485 and nationally it's at 31 000 133 again just so numbers that you understand how

033we're faring um against the rest of the states our current unemployment rate in farmington really improved over last year we're at 2.9 percent and the state were still at 4.4 also a great improvement in the unemployment rate on the state level from last year at this time so when you look at our uh uh commercial base it's made up of 4.1 million square feet of office space which is a lot of office space and in the past last year at this time our vacancy rate was 5.3 it has climbed to 8.1 which shouldn't be surprising to any of us with the new remote work that has become so you know much of the norm so again that's an area that i'm putting a lot of uh focus on and just trying to make sure that

034i understand what exactly is happening there our industrial we have 2.1 million square feet of industrial space and that only has a 1.3 vacancy rate in fact many big projects that are coming uh to the state in the in terms of development projects our big distribution centers big warehousing centers as you can imagine because so much commerce is now e-commerce and we just don't have the space or um the green space even to even be able to be in competition with that so just you know having a little bit of a of an insight into our business community so um this past year um and especially over the past several years i'd have to say one of my biggest focuses has been on communication communicating with our businesses communicating with our residents and connecting the

035two and i know i've been before you already to talk about explore farmington but i thought that again i'd give you some data to see how is it that we're doing so year over year uh we we post daily on facebook and instagram we post as needed on linkedin and then we send a weekly email to people and we send a monthly business newsletter so our stats have really gone up quite a bit um in face our facebook reach has gone up um which is such a huge number when i saw it i questioned it but i started checking it with last year's numbers um and it's correct it's at 210 816 for the year that is how facebook calculates its statistics on how many people read our posts and it has reached um our

036new uh facebook likes that has gone up quite a bit as well um more people like us on a regular basis uh our instagram reach uh is up 121 and that's uh at almost 4 000 people meaning that each time our instagram poach goes out there that's a cumulative effect over the year our visits our facebook visits have stayed pretty stable and our instagram profile visits are up um 97 percent so our followers i kind of checked back and in march of 2020 we had 647 facebook followers and as of today we have 1918 followers so it has taken some focus and some work but i think the numbers are bearing fruit that people are seeing these posts and and it is being reached um we use constant contact to really communicate with our residents

037and last year we sent out 85 000 emails that's to individual emails and uh we had 29 000 of them open it up which is a great open rate of 34 and that's a growth of about five percent and we also added 145 new people that subscribed either using the uh subscribe now to our newsletter which is on explore farmington or even emailed me myself i always knew when there was a good email or a good post because people would say i heard you have a newsletter can you send it to me and then i would add their their address so as i i won't go over everything that we but we improved explore farmington quite a bit and it is being used a lot more and then over this last year really to help

038our small businesses we did three different shop local campaigns and then we also sent surveys out to make sure that merchants saw some type of a response from those campaigns and then we we catered the campaigns to make sure that happened last year we had two in-person breakfasts the first one was with advanced ct's bioscience business development director and then we invited mike gomen from goldman and york to really talk to us about what's the new normal in commercial real estate and and that was quite a bit of an eye-opener we have a number of development projects that are currently underway and uh you'll see that metro realty has a 33 000 square foot medical office building under construction there's a redevelopment of 240 244 and 248 main street he's trying to build a little

039new village center it's going to be retail and small offices and then there's a new retail plaza at 54 56 58 farmington avenue which is as as you're going towards the reservoir you'll see it's a new little retail plaza that's going to have five different uh store occupants and he already has three of them leased we have a couple of a number of projects completed chase manhattan manhattan bank they're open and the really cool part about that project was the historic preservation of the building behind it that was completed thomaston bank and the storage facility on route 6 was completed and currently underway is a renovation of the former farmington marriott lots of smaller new businesses like the hartford baking company detail garage the vault iron horse pub family pizza and kitchen and aeropharmacy which

040those are small businesses that you think under a pandemic who would have the nerve to open up but they did and i appreciate very much those efforts seven new stores in the mall so i tell you these things so you understand that we continue to be a vibrant business community we've had you know some areas of concern with the office space but overall the town really continues to be very favorable our planning department has never been busier with different meetings and people looking to do new things and so i just kind of wanted to share all that with you and of course if you have any questions i'm i'm here right maybe i could just intro one of the things but you talked about explore farmington and that you know what we learned is that

041with the during the pandemic the information that rose was able to bring out to the small businesses about the information i think was really very very valuable and that i think the word spread to the all the different businesses and you know even just to the community just getting information out on explore farmington and i can definitely see why it would the numbers are improved that much because when i looked at them really you know businesses when we all the restaurants when they had to do the permitting to try to have the out outside dining that flew like wild everyone knew about it everyone was coming in and it really was a great communication tool yeah i'd agree it was great seeing our businesses opening up ahead of many other towns and you did a

042great outreach there so thank you and and moving them along to each different step as the rules were changing helping them understand what the rules were you know we got things like plexiglass yes spaces uh and uh wear masks curbside pickup all that stuff was was great and explorer farmington is great for anybody watching hop on you got all kinds of great news uh is it thursday you come out with what's going on for the weekend or is that wednesday no usually wednesday or thursday we're now making it a 10 day because a lot of different events said rose we need more time so now we do it every 10 days to kind of you know spread it out a little more yeah but it's it's midweek so that people know what's good happening plan

043ahead for the weekend yes so any questions for rose ed uh yeah first i'd like to echo the comments of kathy and cj i think you did a fantastic job in this second year of the pandemic really giving that personal touch to our uh our local businesses and the shop local campaign and uh explore farmington has been fantastic it's been great to see that evolve the explore farmington 2.0 presentation you gave us uh earlier the um last year and um could you talk a little bit about um the wayfinder signage i know that's another um initiative that you're working on yep yeah i'm happy to do that thank you i'm working with uh bruce seer and bicycle advisory committee and so we really thought that it was important we had so many increased users on

044our trail system and many of them were residents but a whole lot of them were visitors and when they walked the trails i don't think many of them realize that our town centers were close by especially unionville so we really focused on unionville and on the depot crossing area and we thought let's put a very simple signage that really tries to draw people if you're on the trails letting them know that closely nearby they have a wealth of different options for restaurants beverages even cvs if they have blisters and need a band-aid and things of that nature so we worked with slr and they did some concepts for us we went showed them to adrc and the unionville historic district committee and they gave us consensus and so now comes the hard part and it's

045making sure that we have a good sign person that's going to be able to make them for us and then install them so we're working on that bit of it one uh very interesting thing is we're going to coordinate that sign with all the work that's being done on explore farmington and there's going to be a qr code so when the trail user wants to scan that qr code it will then open it up to the places map on explore farmington and they could see exactly where they are so they can see exactly from where they are how they can get so we're we're hoping it's going to be successful people will use it and then we're you know we'll we'll continue uh throughout the trail and do it in other stops so we've identified

046about four other places that we think we should go so our first uh number one deliverable will be getting those signs uh installed hopefully by spring but spring is almost now so maybe early summer doesn't feel like it tonight no it doesn't feel like it is i'm seeing snow in the window right just a general question are there currently trail maps on explore farmington we have uh one we have a number of maps on explore farmington that had to do with our gateway project and we have a historic walking trail throughout the downtown and then we also have a cultural trail and we haven't put all the trails on there what we do is we do have links under the guide of experience local and then those links go directly to the farmington um trails

047council so we put a link to them because it was a little bit um too complicated to to because we would have to pay our web designer to recreate those trails again and why double with the work you know it's already been done for farm spring rose any talk with raytheon what are they doing i know there's about five business buildings in there i know marriott gone but they're changing over to apartments well we i i have heard from cbre who is representing that um one of their buildings will definitely be available by the end of the third quarter for 115 000 square feet um so again that's how the concern starts to build and um so i think our challenge and and i think we could we could address it very well is really

048when it happens to be very flexible and adaptable and so being open to other ideas of what can be done if it's not going to be office space what should it do what should it be i've been attending a number of seminars i also met with david lehman the commissioner of decd that came up the commissioner thought the best thing to do is to take uh all the office and convert it into apartments and residential i don't know if there's that much of a need for that we already have a number of multi-family apartments coming before us but really being able to be adaptable a great example of that is when a hundred thousand square feet became available at the mall lauren taylors approached the town and they went before planning and zoning and asked

049if it could be used in in addition to retail to allow for medical office space that's the type of thing we're going to have to do i think the name of the game in the future will be redevelopment which is really in our favor because we don't have a lot of green space available to do all new construction so it's really looking at our buildings what is underperforming what is not being used and what do we need to do to make it of a useful highest use and so that's going to entail really collaboratively having this vision and working with developers who want to do something and making sure their plans then coexist and and complement what we as a town want so it's gonna it's gonna take some coordination thank you actually do have

050a question sure i'm so excited about everything that you're doing for farmington oh thank you and and thank you for helping us thrive as much as we do it's my pleasure i do have one question about uh about lowman's plaza i know yeah this has not been a great time for building but is there any action going on over there you know brian that is a good question there hasn't been any action but that is one of my focuses for this year because jackson labs is thinking about or has said that they always have had plans to hopefully grow more they're being very successful where they are but they have communicated to me that they don't want to be the only ones in this bioscience arena that uh you know is growing they they need

051other partners so to make that focus to make a focus of really growing that whole area so i have been i coordinated a meeting with metro realty who is part owner of lowman's and jackson labs they met with their leadership last month to make sure that both of them understand what each other needs so jeff seger was you know uh very much trying to take all his notes what do these scientists needs we've already had two companies move out of the tip which is a uconn's technology incubator program they've grown and thankfully we were able to keep them in farmington but we want to be able to keep them more in farmington so it's very difficult to build not difficult expensive to build lab space on spec because the square footage amount is very high

052so in order for a developer to build this you know it's not as if they will build it and then they will come so it has to be a coordinated effort and i'm also working with advanced ct and then working with decd so that they know these are our assets when you start you know recruiting different life science companies remember this is what we have here in farmington and then the last thing we're doing i've partnered with the central chamber of commerce and they're going to be doing the business of life science business forum and that's scheduled for may 24th and that's going to be a panel discussion with jackson labs the tip and a manufacturer who does medical devices because we want everyone to start to understand life science here's a business behind it

053so if we start showcasing and bringing more and more attention that there there are these offerings here in farmington and i'm hoping that that will start to bubble the interest and then lomans will be able to have an end user that's wonderful rosa's been spending a lot of time like she said just coordinating people she knows jackson she knows this one she knows that one and trying to marry them and match them up um and i think i think something will uh i hope so yeah i think so does does it have to stay in that medical corridor they really want it they um it was funny i said i was trying to tell them about the space that the city of hartford has which is not that far away they're like oh no rose

054that's way too far they need specimens like if they're working on something they want to be able to you know go right across the street and there's a lot of collaboration that exists it really is a very intricate um kind of needs that they have and and they they they need collaborating together so they they want a lot of scientists under in one small area they need health care to be near it which we already have so we already have a great foundation we just have to now connect the dots and what's the minimum square footage they look for again it all depends if it's a startup that the lab could be maybe 400 square feet but then it's what's in that lab they have to have a clean lab and they have to have

055the air exchange and you know they start talking and it goes right over my head a little bit but it's very interesting to kind of sit back and hear them all and the type of equipment that they all need to share and do they have enough uh bandwidth because they do a lot of data and so there's a lot of requirements for it it's a lot more complicated than i imagined but i'm learning you're doing very well oh holly thank you other questions for rose excellent great job overall thank you well thank you love explorer farmington and love seeing the small businesses and every business coming down so thank you great well thank you all for all your support both pages are 14 and 13. all right i'd like to make a motion to tell

056a ta pages 14 and 15 to the budget second we have the motion of the second any further discussions seeing none all in favor all right all right closed motion passing out have a good evening i think i'll be short you guys thank god thank you rosie we have russ arnold our director of public works up next russ i almost called you by your nickname so public works is the uh green tab it's pages 43 through 54. it's uh public works administration highway and grounds and engineering uh the proposed request for this public works group account is 4.82 above the current budget this is basically a flat budget one of the things i just wanted to note is that in the public works administration account it does have a large increase on that the reason

057for that increase is that russ's time is split um by the budget with the water pollution control authority and they're a separate budget than our budget and over the last few years we have um his part of his salary a large not a large part but a larger than now has been billed to the water pollution control authority because when we were doing the upgrade he spent a considerable amount of time doing that now that that project is is done that money is now back into this budget so that's where the increase is on that that's basically compensating a previous decrease right okay um i'm trying to think if there's really it's very a very flat budget russ was there anything in here i think that that we wanted to note um i went i

058went through it just before the meeting and i saw it just being very flat there's not much there's no problem yeah russ's department and uh under russ has been very short-staffed over the last year we're finally getting back up to speed as even though it's uh not in this account but russ is in charge of the planning department also it's just the whole development wing is ex has been extremely extremely busy over the last two years between building permits um being short staffed issues with planners and russ and his group really his core group of people have really stepped up to the plate and russ as you know does all our grants for all the state work and the different things that go so for a while there us was our one-man show we finally

059were able to hire another engineer a lower level engineer in his department and now with the planning department stabilized we have also overall in his department we've asked for uh an increase from the part-time fire marshal's position to a full-time secretarial position that position won't just be dedicated to the fire marshal it'll be dedicated to the whole development wing and also the other we had um we're adding a part-time and a half more position to the building official position so those two things are in uh building is on page 42 and fire marshall's on page 26 but that russ is in charge of um all of those departments too so really i think one of the things that we're hopeful for is that you keep your staffing and uh be nice yeah that would help

060yeah it's been it's been it's been rough with uh difficult to get employees and different things well it's been a challenging two years obviously for your department as well there's been a lot you've been adding to and uh which was not in previous job descriptions that had to be done while we're working through cove and all that the grants are fantastic i think we talked about some of the numbers not too long ago of grants that you've brought in so uh that's huge right russ and his group in the highway garage and you know everyone has really stepped up for everything with covet and you know we've talked about it before but even anything that had to do within the town hall putting up these barriers everything just to keep the operations running and he's

061got a couple of really very handy people in the highway department that are were carpenters and different things and really anything that we need to have done just call up and um in the town clerk's office before i don't know if anyone was in there when it was really with covet we had different things going on because they built things so the clerk's office could stay open and they have done a great job for us great questions for russ i got a quick one no highway department many vehicles do those two mechanics handle because obviously they're doing a phenomenal job keeping everything up and running for us and keeping our expenses low that is one number there was like no down time for those two guys you know what we also do is we have

062other we've been lucky as kathy said we hire different people with different skill sets and we have a certified welder we have other guys who are mechanically inclined so they help out and do some of the more remedial day-to-day oil changes and things like that to help to mechanics so they're basic offsetting the fabrication stuff that needs to be done it doesn't need to go out to specialty places we can take care of it in-house right we do the majority of our fabrication and welding and house we send the truck up there's a point for the framework right so we things like that where it's we need some certification it's going to they're doing it the right way in accordance with manufacturing specifications we sent that out to our benefit to send it there but

063for the most part if something needs to be made we created and uh go to go back we talked about before previous consoles about how we're going to take care of our own stone i think at one point or crushing or something like that yeah back in the fall late fall we you know we came to you with a process that we over the years during our road reconstructions and our catch basin replacements we we collect all that material so what happens is we back years ago you would pay silicon to come in reclaim all the material you pay them to put it down you pay them to take it away and you pay them to put it back so we ended up keeping saying let's keep some of this stuff we kept the majority

064of it and we ended up we hired a fan in december november december we were here december yeah yeah for crushing that material and we end up with a material we've got about 15 000 yards of processed aggregate base which took all their old catch basin tops rock some old pieces of granite things like that and gravel and just dirt material and created a whole new process so instead of going and buying it from tilcon or colossae or somebody or dunning we have this material now that we have we've paid for it multiple times over and now we can reuse it behind the catch basins in a pothole things like that so it really got 15 000 yards as good as scope longer than my career oh great well thank you for everything again i

065know i said it before at the other meeting so thanks for looking and looking forward to thinking to you saving us money i just have one question for the uninitiated for the catch basins and the material that you're talking about this is to fill potholes uh underneath not the blacktop itself okay it goes underneath basically some of these bottles we have to cut out pull the old bad material out we'll put that that material that we just created in and pave over that okay got it one of the things that um russ also is another duty is that as many of you know that we have a really very good relationship with the school system and we're all a big team and russ is going to one be very involved and he has been very

066involved in watching the school project too and the construction of it and he's now been attending quite a few of the design meetings and it's great that being a local person he has quite a bit of knowledge about the site and what has gone on and uh you know it's it's really quite a benefit that we have someone that is going to help us and watch watch the one the biggest project that we've ever done in town so that's another thing that's going to be taking up some of your time so going from our free previous biggest project you're stepping into the new biggest project there's always something new no that's great you've been around and you've been in town your whole life you've been around watching all this going on so that's got to

067be a tremendous help to the architects the builders everyone who's looking at the ground and you can tell them exactly what's really underneath there i don't know if they consider the help they might not see it that way but certainly from our side it's a big help you gotta say like russ is like the acorn that's grown into that big huge boat as you will okay thank you you're welcome sir russ uh thank you thank you for this and uh to your point you've given us a tight budget and i know this is a small item but i see the gas and diesel fuel accounts reflex usage and current pricing and i'm wondering if that was written prior to the last two weeks and not knowing what's going on in the future i want to

068make sure that you're comfortable for what we have there yeah no yeah i i would say you know again we this budget was completed before and so i think all our gas and utilities are something you know when we were going to talk later but it's a good point now is that and we might need to continue to yeah exactly i don't want you to be caught in a right tough spot yeah i have a few roads that we won't plow with no diesel so [Laughter] our roads are always the first to go if you're not plowing first you skip all the council's roads do everyone else's first then you get back to us later you don't want to accompany complaints on your own yeah like i don't get them because you do a nice

069job no that's a very good point though it's probably something that you know as time goes into april and some different things and not just here but yeah right no absolutely and then as i've always said to you guys the public works doesn't have like the friends of the public works like they have the friends of the library the friends of the school everything but really you're the pulse of the what goes on here in farmington the public works department yeah we don't want anyone breaking down like like trunks like the truck the the tanks in the route in ukraine yeah no well it's it's one of those departments that when you don't hear anything that's a good thing because people are very quick to complain if something doesn't get done right you get the

070other side any other questions for ross none no okay i'm going to do it next so we'll have a ta from 43 to yes let's make the motion to temporarily approve pages 43 to 54 of the town budget second motion a second any questions hearing none all in favor aye aye opposed motion passing house if we could go to page um that building oh fire that's 42 is uh public works that's not right hold on one second do you have the page we'll go to page 26. age 26 is uh the fire marshall account one of the things that i always like to highlight in the fire marshal's account is the hydrant charges um and that's on page 26 the last item and that is our which we pay to the various water companies we

071pay a maintenance fee provide to provide water service to the town hydrogen fees are essentially a utility that the town does not have any control over and those the increases are are large and as you can see we're paying one million one hundred and twelve thousand dollars to the various uh utility companies so this is a this is a big line item in our budget other than that in the fire marshall account that was going to uh from a full-time i mean from a part-time to a full-time secretary and that shows in the narrative too in this account questions on the fire marshal being known in jail for page number 26 yes i'd like to temporary approve page 26 of the town manager's budget second a motion a second any additional question 42 none all

072in favor all right closed passing in our next one is if you could go to page 42. and that's the building depart building inspector department and as you can see here the total uh from current to proposed is we're adding uh one position and it's really again the way that everything is slotted out it's it's a half any questions for this building inspector pages just to comment um from my experiences in my business and dealing with the town hall and the amount of staffing they have especially at the building department we are definitely under a lot of towns that we deal with uh they've definitely keep they kept that lean and and provided the service at the same time great thank you other questions or comments motion a second joseph i will make the motion

073for to accept page number 42 of the town manager's budget second we have a motion a second any additional comments seeing none all in favor aye aye aye opposed motion passing i think the next page is 18 18 19 and 20. and that is uh the planning department and we talked about um the staffing we went from 3.5 to 4. and other than that in the planning department like i was talked about earlier we're very pleased our new um assistant town planner uh it seems to be working out really well uh shannon's doing a spectacular job for us things have really seems to have stabled out for us so we're pleased about that and it's very very busy that's good too yeah messenger comments on the planning department yep just one quick question on page

07419. yep on uh under uh contractual services i noticed the department request was ten thousand um but you're putting in zero um is there a reason for that so remind me what that was um as you know there's a couple of lawsuits out there and so the department requested money for legal fees that's the ten thousand dollars and we traditionally are our customers to budget all our legal fees in the town attorney account so we'll pay for the legal fees out of the town attorney's account not out of here so got it so just moving it to this different account basically yeah all right i'm just gonna make a comment on the town planner coming from planning and zoning before coming here um in just two years we had three different town planners shannon was

075always the most stable piece of that entire department and having her as the full-time player now i think is a real benefit to the town right so right any other comments for planning i'd like to make the motion to ex to temporary proof pages 18 through 20 of the town manager's budget second motion of seconds any additional comments or questions seeing none all in favor all right all right opposed i wasn't passing amazon do we have one more oh refuse the brown tab in the back okay stop it you thought it first before i said anything [Laughter] it should be more wpca oh that's where i was um so as you can see on this account uh the revenues match the appropriations and what this is is that this is uh the budget includes the

076cost of collecting and disposing of solid bulky and hazardous waste generated by town residents and the town's landfill operation this proposes a rate increase of 18 the annual fee will be 272 dollars per household there's definitely a lot going on in the garbage world right now and so we'll be more to come on that uh russ has been doing some investigation about you know i'm sure many of you heard about mirror and what's going on with that so we are on top of that but right now we think that we'd be able to keep our rate at 272 per household and but like i said there is a lot going on in the garbage world and where people are with the mirror plant and where people are going to dispose of their garbage our contractor

077so i just had a quick question about that what's the timeline for the closing of the plant like how much time do we have before we have to find an alternate place what three months three months okay we will probably be back in front of you uh with a recommendation the change uh potentially change we got to talk about it amongst ourselves that is a little bit more uh based on you know numbers and a lot of varying factors that are going to go into this this has been going on for probably two and a half three years now so we are gonna it's gonna move quick at this point we've been waiting that information back from here and we finally received that last week we'll be back so it's really a basic if we're

078gonna continue with mirror and sign a contract with them or go with someone else and so we have to make that decision relatively quick so i would anticipate if it's not at the next meeting would definitely be at the next the meeting after that we'll be making a recommendation to you all about that okay and then looking long-term are there things that as a town we should be like educating our residents because if you don't have that well if you could reduce the amount of garbage that you have to get rid of theoretically you should be able to save a couple of bucks because you're not paying for as much um just in terms of like you know 10 years from now if we could get i don't know an eighth of a percent lower

079in terms of what we put out he actually the garbage world savings is the worst thing you can do to save money because you need bulk you need garbage too especially now with the plant closing garbage will be shipped out of state and you know because the shipping garbage for some reason declines the more garbage you ship so they're actually looking for commitments as to the less you want to ship or you're planning on shipping the higher the rate becomes so so there's an incentive for you to actually ship out more the possibility of garbage you know who disposes of our trash we get more into it but um there isn't there's not economies of scale it's the more trash and actually it's worked that way all along i mean it's not this is not

080something new your existing agreement with era or the old crra actually had minimum requirements you had to actually bring certain punished amounts there otherwise you could be penalized so and that's been long standing for the past 20 or 30 years huh they've been burned facilities you need a certain amount of trash to burn and facility in order to generate electricity or whatever to make it worthwhile doing that so um there's two competing um concepts on this one you need traction so we're trying to reduce the traction for the waistband okay yeah i don't want to take up your time i know we're talking about dollars and cents right now in the budget but yeah we'll have a i look forward to our discussion but there is but just quickly though that obviously that that's the

081financial end of it but there's also the environmental end of it and you know i think our green efforts committee has been looking at some different things and we've been attending quite a few meetings um with the dep and there's different things being thrown out there for pay for your own garbage bags and some various different things to help lower the car have less garbage which is the opposite of the financial end but it's the environmental end of things and i know i think that um shannon and i were talking a little bit about composting and some various different things that there's a whole list that we want to try to do and i think the green efforts committee is going to be reviewing some of those different items as we go forward one thing

082to note too since we switched to the automated cards back in oe recycling at 11. our waste has reduced consistently down and we're leveling off now so i think you know as you said educate the residents more we put stuff out every year typically in the annual newsletter and spring and fall or i forget what it whenever they go on camera because the summer whatever it is and it's we're at the point now with part of the problem is single stream to medium people aren't going to like this but it's a great fancy word but it ruins a lot of the recycling because if you put your pizza box in there the whole thing goes to the garbage yeah goes to waste because you can't recycle the greasy cardboard that's in there so and it's

083just habit like it's cardboard it's got to be recyclable but when it goes as a single stream it's very tough to sort all that stuff and they pick things up once they see a load has those commingles in there it just goes to the boat to the wayside so single stream has its benefits of rapid you know quicker collection but going back to the day when the truck would come around and separate source separate at your curbside and separate your green glass your clear glass and your paper goods everything it's cost more but it was more efficient and you got more out of it today there's nowhere to bring these recyclables china isn't taking them it's very difficult to get rid of them so you're still charging us zero dollars for the recyclables but we're

084paying more in the garbage and for as joe said that the less government you give the higher you pay but you still got to have the garbage and it's there's other programs that the dep is looking at for like an extended producer responsibility to change the packaging of items or package when you order stuff from amazon and you know you order a box of pens and it comes in a box ten times the size one of those things is to make them change their packaging plus take the you know that cardboard back well in my opinion it's just if you're paying for it to be delivered regardless of the size of the package and they got to send the truck back around to pick up the cardboard that they delivered it in they're going to

085pay more for the product so there's ups and downs to every thing that you do and i think a lot of it just comes down to how much you personally understand and recycle and have time to do it how many people recycling cans are over topped after a couple days you got to break down your boxes you got to separate things out you got to make sure it will fit and my kids would give me a hard time because i'm out there slicing my boxes up and making them that they can and you know because other people see boxes and they just throw a full box in but we can educate as much as we can but getting people to actually do that that's the difficult part of it because of people's time the ups

086and downs of recycling in about 30 seconds garbage that's okay we have the green efforts committee the chair is sitting right next to me he's going to go around right before collection day you know big stick talk quietly make sure that those boxes are broken down the other thing too like to go like kathy mentioned the page you throw about your you know buy bags and thought processes instead of paying three cents a bag when you go to the large department stores and buy a box of garbage bags you would buy a bag from the town for a dollar or whatever 50 cents or a dollar a bag the thought process is you would use that sparingly recycle for this forced recycling well again how many what's the time and effort you're going to take

087to do all that you're still producing you're not going to change your food habits you're going to buy the same food that you're buying it's just a matter of how many times you're going to fill that diagonal then what happens when the bag is you know if i don't use that that certain colored bag you're gonna have to have garbage police going around every route every day big stick and it's just it creates another you know cost to the system so there's things that you know are really going to happen it's a balance it's difficult i don't think you know people's taxes are going to go up and you could double it just because of the amount of personnel you may need when you go to that system and the chances they say that people

088don't illegally dump and drop their stuff off you know elsewhere in town at different dumpsters and outside the dumpsters i truly think that that's going to happen and we're going to see an increase one thing i think that helps us is our bulky waste pickup having that twice a year or even when we had it we went back and we had a you call for your bulky waste to help people out from being more convenient we still get some illegal dumpings here and there but they are few and far between the frequency is way down it's well worth the money to do the bulky waste yeah from that standpoint because now i got to send two guys with a truck then we're taking it and we're paying the additional weight it's just we're silent we're

089always there so that's what it is a good point other questions on the waist page okay joe cathy is that 60. 69 through 71. make a motion to temporarily approve pages 69 through 71 of the town manager's budget second motion a second any further comments hearing none all in favor aye aye opposed motion pass unanimously is that it for us thank you russ thank you sir have a good night for us you too you want to go [Music] i think we'll do nancy we'll do you next and then we'll do yeah everyone knows uh nancy perrin our director of uh community recreation oh no oh no it's the mustard tab nancy's pages are pages 55 through 65. it's community and recreational services she has a small increase in the budget 3.11 one of the things

090to note here is that um a few years back um nancy had recommended that we uh take on dial-a-ride um the service in-house in the past we had contracted it out and nancy felt strongly that we could do it more efficiently and save money and it actually really worked and we are it worked really well and so now we have our own dial-a-ride drivers and we contract out a small portion which is the answering of the phones is that how it works and um but the program is doing really really well but we've had um part-time workers that are our dial-a-ride drivers and uh nancy has recommended that where we restructure how we are do operate the service and she would like to make a part-time driver into a full-time driver and it works easier

091logistically for a lot of different reasons because you can't work certain amount of hours when you're part-time how you have to move people around various factors that go along with it so um i think it's a good idea to go to a part-time from a part-time to a full-time person the other thing that's kind of neat in the dial ride is that you've changed up a little bit the service of the big vans all the time and the as you know is that you call and the dial-a-ride van comes and picks you up and it takes you to various parts but now i think some of it was related to covert but we've also realized that some of it works better that maybe not having such the big van come and it's a smaller vehicle

092and it takes fewer people to various things and then you're not paying as much for the gas and some things that go along so i think you're one of your vehicles now is going to be a smaller vehicle right for the dialer ride so the whole service it's a really people love the dial ride service it's a um something that's new and nancy has been expanding it and doing it better and i think it's been a very big successful story for us great asset to the town what was that it's a great asset to the town yeah and nancy's area no she's over at the staples house but they do a ton of different things for us and nancy i thought maybe you could just just highlight a couple of things for us because sometimes

093again people don't really realize what goes on in your department well really just kind of coming off coved where we're working on just kind of rebuilding how we do some of our programs senior center seniors are so thrilled to be out of the house and to be interacting and just the way we're running the programs where all of our programs are getting filled up really fast we're also reaching out to folks who may still not feel comfortable to to come out we have a group of about 1500 people that we check in to you know each month with we have volunteers through a few different places those are also the same people that helped us register folks for vaccines as well as you know boosters and things like that youth services we've been working really

094hard we've had quite a large number of juvenile review board cases which is the juvenile justice program for kids under a certain age and just doing a lot more counseling with anxiety and things of that nature so all areas have been really busy on the onset of covet we were really working on a lot of financial factors with folks that you know not working and things of that nature now that's not so much the case it's working on more a lot of the mental health services and you know unfortunately a lot of rebound on that so you know all our different committees have really been focusing on that and then nancy also runs the recreation side of farmington and the golf course and that is very stable i think we have our our programs and

095the golf course over the last uh couple years during covet was uh really really busy and it stabilized a little bit but we're not 100 sure because the weather last summer was really not very good so we're still hoping that to get back up to maybe those covet numbers but the gold summer i think we had seven weekends that were complete busts so it was hard to tell if but the golf course had been really very very busy and very creative with a lot of your different programs that you guys have done during covent and really because people as you all know were dying to have any kind of activity so especially anything that they could do outside during covet but i think we're pretty much back to normal we have been planning our summer

096concerts and um we moved him over here um because at the gazebo was hard to keep people socially distanced i mean we had one concert i think we counted 725 people that came so how many yeah yeah and that land actually takes on a lot of people it doesn't feel as big as it is um but then managing the data ride were able to go pick up all the seniors to bring them there when it wasn't our service we couldn't do some of those things so um we really need for the networking and the community to kind of come alive which has been really good that's great and nancy was very creative with those concerts they had the circles all drawn out and that you had everyone had their pod so but uh we're we're

097happy we're back to getting back to normal yeah and we do a lot of collaboration i mean we have the cert truck comes to every one of our concerts we used to do food trucks but now um you know they're committed to coming to every one of our concerts and um you know we've used that in different places we use both the fire department and the police department for our holiday giving programs and you know doing that sort of thing so we really try to collaborate with every department in every organization in town to be able to provide our service and we couldn't do it without them no doubt and nancy you weren't here but we showed it um your little video at i think the last council meeting which was really kind of cool

098just showing a lot of the different things that you guys do the breadth of uh how much you cover throughout town and the people that you touched throughout was just very impressive today right and one thing that because you had such a good contact list and you do check it really helped out during covet when you had to get the people vaccinated and you knew who to call and who to go to and you guys really rolled out quite a vaccine program yeah and the health department had told us that we had scheduled all ours for our farmington we were up to anybody over the age of 75 it was 98 had scheduled so and that was due to the great volunteers that we had that helped us with that yep fantastic yeah so so

099nancy is page uh 55-65 i don't know if anyone has any questions on any of her nancy you mentioned um the youth program for when they get in trouble are we looking to bring in more counseling for them because obviously you're seeing a lot of more you're looking for different intervention programs or such to try to help absolutely and we have one full-time counselor we also have an additional counselor who's paid through through a variety of grants and we keep you know every couple of months they tell you we've got a few more things for chris to do so we any grant that we can get to help support and use positive youth development in our community i will go after immediately because i think that's critical and important thank you other questions for nancy

100just again thank you uh through the pandemic yes you were incredibly creative you continued to keep people engaged and you did a great job of reaching out to the people who couldn't get out i mean the shut-ins and the people who were our most at-risk population you were you were the contact there so thank you for all the work you did there yeah exactly i like to echo that also especially you know for the services you provided for them they can go out shopping to make sure that you had someone going out providing their you know their list of groceries getting it to them so you were one of our good volunteers and the golf course was the first thing open so it was fun to watch people actually showing up early on uh one

101person per golf cart doing everything good to keep them safe so yeah all right i can make a motion to temporarily prove pages 55 through 65 of the time manager's budget second i have a motion a second any further discussion seeing none all in favor posed motion pass unanimously all right the next one would be the wreck fund which is pages 72-79 the red tab so this is our recreation fund this is the fund that's separate from the operating budget as you can see here our revenues are 682 996 dollars in our appropriations uh match and these are all our recreation programs our bus trips our camps and uh the office administration so right now we do have a balanced budget i don't know if you have any questions on the rec uh fund direct

102funds questions it's all divided out into the type of program the sports and physical fitness does that account for the new equipment going into the senior center uh no that's in the senior center thank you these are the fees that you get for you know the playing the basketball programs the soccer programs those types of things any other questions being known like to make a motion to temporarily accept pages 72-79 of the town manager's budget second motion second any further comments seeing none all in favor aye aye aye opposed motion pass unanimously uh the next one is the nice blue tab at the end the recreation westwoods fund and that would be pages 80 through 83. the first page is the the revenues and the appropriations as you can see our revenues total 624 500

103and appropriations match where our appropriate our revenues are from the greens fees the season tickets the golf cart rentals the driving range and interest in small for the other and our appropriations that are going out or the clubhouse the restaurant the driving range and the golf cart rentals questions on the golf course can i ask so i see the appropriation for a restaurant but i don't see money generated by the restaurant up top unless i'm just missing it or where is that slotted in the restaurant we have the contract out for so we just have a small budget just for the supplies and things of that nature but we uh we contract out for that okay and they do pay us a rental fee for that contract but that's the only revenue that we get

104okay and we did a did we do like a little rehab in there too we did much needed too yeah do we get any information on what you know how well attended that is like is that a popular place to be right now of course or the restaurant the right like you know you know the 19th hole you know people are finishing up like is that still popular i think i think with the rehab of it the restaurant has not it's not i wouldn't consider one of the things that we are thinking about is that um we the golf course now that it's it's basically stabilized um and we've had some good years with covet putting some money like the restaurant was done the back up deck needs some uh work to it some different

105things you know not just that area of time particularly having something that's you know even if you're not golfing to be able to go and right a couple people for happy hour would be great if that was we're actually going to be doing a few concerts there that'd be great yeah just like acoustic guitar just done a few of the nights to encourage people after they if they've been in a league or if not just to go there yeah i think it's something you know and i know westwood is a smaller course but i think it's something like like hawks landing has like a really nice outside seating area where people can go just and even if you're not golfing just to hang out they do trivia nights there and things like that just i

106thought yeah no it's it's something we've struggled with the restaurant um for many years but we do have someone in there now for has been making investments and we hope that you know with doing the outside deck and doing some different things to try to get some more people because it's beautiful sitting out there that's what i mean yeah it's really easy at sunset like an evening back there it really is a nice yeah but right now it really is and we're hoping you know a little programming might bring in others who might never think of going there okay good question i'd like to make the motion to temporarily approve pages 80 through 83 of the town manager's budget second i have a motion a second any further questions or comments seeing none all in

107favor aye aye opposed out yep thank you good luck with your back um i think we have next uh the police and fire i think we have chief milan here yes we do [Music] yeah we'll do that first i think we'll do fire first so the fire department is pages 27 through and that's under the public safety account so fire to fire department 27 through 30. all right fire department budget is uh very very flat um 1.37 percent increase really a status quo type of uh budget i don't know if there's really anything to highlight let me see what i wrote no i don't know if you have any questions but really just a very uh flat budget any questions for the flat fire budget seeing none i'd like to make the motion to temporarily

108approve pages 27 through 30 of the town manager's budget second i have a motion a second any further comments seeing none all in favor all right uh the next one is but steve hoffman ever had that easy it's all the leadership by the way is your camera on right now 1.37 you're coming at that 1.37 you get that's what happens um the next is the police department which is uh 31 through 39. the police department is another uh very uh flat budget at a 1.59 percent budget increase and oh yeah yeah she does um so very flat budget one of the things though that helped the budget a little bit on the police department side is that if you remember last year some of you is that we did have quite a few items new

109items for the police accountability bill those items are now built into the budget so that they're they're there or some of them we didn't have to spend again so we were able to see some savings because of that um there's really it's a pretty flat budget the only thing that i would say is that the chief has and he has typically for the last couple of years have asked for more employees for the police department we really are on a situation a lot of it has to do with that when um you have to go and when you become a police officer you have to train for how many the training is six months in the academy and then another four months with a field training officer so you're 10 months that's once you've hired

110and the hiring process normally takes three to four months between a written test and then after that right once we select somebody written physical all that then there's a polygraph psych background etc etc so it's over a year so when somebody notifies us they're retiring to fill that person's role in the schedule takes over a year and so that's the struggle that we've kind of and so and we have obviously uh i don't wanna say we there there are no there's no uh there's no fluff there's no bumpers in any of the schedules so basically when an officer is off we have to fill his role with overtime and so you know it's not like i can take somebody and then put them in that role and that sort of thing when somebody's gone so

111that's why you know it's um but but we do very well at retaining employees which other police departments have not been doing in we've also done pretty well in this last year hiring certified officers who have been uh we have one who has about three years and one who has about five years coming on and so for them the training is much less it's only about two months so we were able to get them basically right out you know onto the street quickly uh much more quick than obviously having to send somebody to me and one of the things johnny you said earlier about the building department um i think just you know throughout all the town services we're very light on employees and so the police department's that very fine line about you know

112you need more people but getting one new person really won't help that much because of how it works and you know we're very light but that's kind of how we roll here and uh you know i think that at this point of time based on your budget target and things of that nature we didn't put in um any of the extra people but i think it's fair to let you know that the chief has been putting requesting employees and actually to be fair a lot of the other departments have requested more employees too which were cut out of the budget so that i did based on your target chief for your retention rates besides you being the chief there that people want to stay is it pensions keeping them is it anything that you can

113sort of feel out so i know like berlin other places have you know 401ks or this or that is the pension a main driver to keep some more people longer so we we the two officers we got um came from a non-pension place i think that helps i mean working for the best town manager in connecticut obviously so with the pension obviously and having good but it's it really when it comes down to it having a good work environment um and uh you know this last time those two certified officers we kind of we we asked our officers to go out and find they had to recommend somebody and so with that as you know if you ever recommended somebody for a job where you work you own that person so they have to be

114good people so we knew number one we'd get good people but also they were actively recruiting so talking very positive about the uh agency and so they brought in um some people from from agencies that didn't quite have um you know the yeah yeah the respect of the community the i mean there's a lot of things that going into being a police officer in a community and i think all of them play a part in keeping them including you know the pension the pay the benefits you have to be competitive um to get the best and keep them so we've been doing very well at that you do you find um when you've had instances where you've had offices that need to cover you know if you say you have somebody retired and you're in

115that hiring process and it's in over a year does is there can there be a morale issue if people are working too much overtime can you speak to that or is it something that's not really been an issue for us yeah no there definitely can be and actually the town manager really keeps a pulse on that and uh with me and so this last time when our officer was injured we were allowed to bring on another officer because we were going to be down because don't forget now you know we have officers out long-term injury they're having shoulder surgery well they cannot come back um to work it's not like i can have them sit there and and write reports or whatever they they can't go out on the road and so that impacts it

116and so we do keep what we call it order ins um and so we do keep a very um good watch on that and if any of your following i was just talking to a father of a hartford officer who was talking about how bad it is that his son basically has no time off like he gets ordered in he has to beg for a day off like and they get held over and so morale really takes an impact this might not be something you guys necessarily have but do you do you keep track of overtime hours that are necessary because of you know annually things like this happen injured officers or early retirees or things like that so we can kind of quantify we've used x amount of overtime per week and we're spending

117this for that and if we brought in a new full-time person it would be less because it's not an overtime rate you know you know yeah i know exactly what you're saying um so there's there's a we do that's the answer to that quote simple question is is we do and are we over that line where we are essentially in overtime paying like oh yeah okay no no but one of the things that uh the chief and i talk about often and it's interesting with the collective bargaining and and you're young is that it's really a very very different mentality with the younger people that are coming in all throughout the whole town about this whole overtime chief always tells me that when he was in the rank and file as a police officer everyone

118wanted the overtime people want their free time now yeah it's the same thing with staff yeah you couldn't get enough and now everything's about the time it's not about the overtime and it's we have to i think we had talked about it on one of the collective bargaining that we had to change things over because everyone wants the time and before that wasn't that wasn't the case at all and so um you know so it's a whole different mentality and a balancing act right of how how to do it okay and one last question how are we doing with um our specialized program our statewide guy oh phenomenal yeah i've heard things here and there i know it was you know a couple we're gonna be attended the your meeting a couple months ago you

119got a lot of great information a lot of positive impact it has been so uh he's talking about we've assigned an officer to the greater hartford auto theft task force it's a full-time assignment and they have been well how many phone calls have you gotten from stolen cars and in the last two months we had one stolen car last month compared to previous to that we were up in the like 12 even more but it's not just that they're getting people who have committed carjackings armed robberies and they're all in stolen cars um catalytic converter thefts we had five of them um through his resources and his task force they've identified who did the farmington ones um and they were applying for arrest warrants right now now they've also done them all over the place

120and an interesting i don't know if any of you have newington had a car come in and in the school parking lot at newington high school they cut some catalytic converters out of some cars during school time our officer because he's on this task force knew about it right away sent it to our officers that car then came to farmington high school where then they took off on our guys and you know we didn't pursue it at that time because they have unmarked cars we talked about this so they follow cars until they stop to figure out where they're going and then the next time they do something they wait in front of the house they come back to that location they jump out and they grab them so um but they've been involved in

121a lot of i have a whole um i forwarded it to you on on tuesday we got the uh the monthly summary which is how many arrests they made how many search warrants and arrest warrants and it's phenomenal the amount of work and uh and really the the dent they're putting in he knows everybody by their first and last name that are doing these things and it's the same kind of we'll say you know the same crooks all the time and it's you know groups different groups and uh so but it's been uh thanks for the question it's been very very uh we were going to take him out um in january but i'm going to be on the amount of work that they're doing this group has just been until we see those numbers

122starting to come down and so we talk about it frequently um and you know when that time is so he sort of moved in from you know they they evolved into a more of a violent crime task force instead of just being strictly auto theft task force what's happening it's all tied in right but you can say like there is cover knows almost everything they're not just now we're not going to do that have a good day right so that's great we're really pleased with the officer who's doing it's on the task force too he's doing a really great job um yeah i mean they were up in the highlands there was a solar car that crashed and three people took off and there were guns involved etc he with one call had eight unmarked

123cars here you know what i mean because their whole task force came and uh and they knew the players right away they knew the car they knew where else they'd been and they caught all three like that's what you get when you're involved in these so it's kind of a force multiplier okay when you have an incident rafina does anyone have any other questions i have one i was noticing that there's a funding for three 24-hour patrol vehicles does that mean that patrol or you're stepping up patrols no that's a replacement plan so we replace uh those are the 24 7 district cars the cars you see every day driving around and we have a replacement plan where we do probably three a year they put on i think it's about 50 000 miles a

124year um because they're used 24 hours a day seven days a week um patrolling so um they they get to be very high mileage once they're at a certain mileage we push them down to maybe the school officers um in different divisions and usually they have the the newer cars always go to patrol because they're the you know they're the front lines that need to make sure they have reliable vehicles all the time thank you i think the other thing to emphasize also when you're talking about the cars is they're hard miles too i mean because you're not you're not getting that nice highway miles when you're usually some fast starts and stops but what they talk about with police vehicles also is that they're running almost 24 hours a day so you don't capture

125that in mileage so a lot of places go to our meters which would be unbelievable because they're actually running 24 hours a day seven days a week and go ahead oh yeah um i have a question on page 33 the line item community programs um so i noticed our estimate for 2021 2022 is 13 580 and we're only budgeting 2400 uh this year um and looking at what community community programs account is covering you know crime prevention programs high school and k aid programs women's personal safety class and police explorers all sounds like really good stuff is it is what we're budgeting here enough that we're not cutting back those programs um so what that was that was a part of the police accountability bill where we had to bring in trainers for the diversity

126training and so that was very specific to that year so it went up substantially to bring that training in and then that training is actually being completed as we speak the different modules of it um and so in the we won't need that in coming years then we'll be able to just uh get that through normal training so the number here yeah that's enough yeah so yeah so those programs are actually they don't cost that much to right it's mostly the officer's time so but but that that bump that we had there was specifically for diversity training and to bring trainers in thank you thanks other questions so there is something else you wanted to bring up yes so one of the things that on your budget target we talked about really trying to limit

127the new services and one of the things that the chief and i have been talking about quite a bit and we thought maybe the town council would consider and we're going to watch a little video and because we don't have a new person in the budget that potentially we could have a new officer but if we can watch the video i have been warned we may need to watch an ad before the pledge and i will faithfully partially discharge the powers and duties of my position k9 officer at southern connecticut state university officer jules was sworn in as a working service dog with sergeant torres of the southern police department they joined the growing number of community policing dogs at various connecticut police departments trained by puppies behind bars eight and all including chase indy

128heidi bear addison hodges and skipper the family tree is growing too bear and chase are brother and sister and hodges skipper and jules are all brothers puppies behind bars pbb trains prison inmates to raise service dogs for wounded war veterans and first responders police departments as well as explosive detection canines for law enforcement congratulations [Music] sergeant cynthia torres has been a part of the southern police department for 17 years and a police officer for 23 years having officer jules by her side is very special she says he's added a whole new dimension to her life as an officer my words can't describe it i it was absolutely amazing it was so nice to officially welcome him to the southern police department although he's been here for a few weeks there's something extra special about the

129swearing-in ceremony for any police officer everyone on campus is excited for officer jules including southern connecticut state university president bertolino well i think officer jules has already brought a great deal of joy and enthusiasm to the campus as we talked about earlier today it's really an opportunity i think for individuals to feel comfort and have a comfort level with our law enforcement in a way that perhaps they may not otherwise have had but very popular member of our community there's no doubt about it and just how does chief dooley of southern police department feel about officer jules well as i keep saying lots of smiles the swearing in today was very special embraced by the community the entire southern community and our law enforcement partners in this area and we're just really proud even southern

130student katie was thrilled to be here today jules is a great dog we had a great day and it was a great swearing in and then we got made him cookies officer jules is certified for many things from officer wellness community engagement and something very unique he assists with survivors of violence so victims he'll stay in the room when they're giving statements congratulations officer jules and sergeant torres southern connecticut state university police department it was a great swearing-in and one of the other responsibilities for jules is dates play dates are you guys ready let's have some fun for channel 3 eyewitness news i'm renee denino we do have a new off we have a police dog and that dog is a police dog this is these kinds of dogs are called comfort dogs and paul

131has had quite a few requests from some of the officers and he's talked to some of the different chiefs and it's not very expensive it's about eight thousand dollars um to get a comfort dog and maybe you can talk about what you would see the comfort dog doing and some of the benefits to it so the the comfort dog would be for so i can tell you that we've already used it twice um uh for our officers we've yeah we've we've borrowed one we've had a comfort dog come um and twice were for juvenile sex assault victims and they just felt much more comfortable talking to the detectives with having that dog it just breaks a barrier makes them feel more comfortable and it actually was a phenomenal tool that the detectives thought of especially

132when they had young victims of sex violence so um that was one part and then the other part is when officers we do debriefings mental health and stress for police officers has become has been put on the forefront it was one of the the pillars uh president obama's 21st pillar um about the mental health and stress and so these comfort dog service dogs are around and kind of assist with that too like when we do a debriefing and that sort of thing it would be used in schools it would be used in senior centers it would be used all over the place obviously that dog would be would have a handler who would be a police officer and it allows you to be approachable so it was interesting we had an intern in today and

133we were talking about this dog and the intern is from university of connecticut and so we were talking about the dog and she knew the yukon dog she's like we love that dog so it was kind of interesting that you know i just happened to be talking to an officer about this and that sort of thing and she right away knew about and knew the dog's name etc so it allows police and if you think about the last several years policing some of the images in the national media that have been sent it really allows a different kind of optic for our police department where you're approachable but it also has a positive impact we had k9 drak who was very good in the schools i mean we used to laugh that during the parades

134everybody we didn't even have to be there because everybody was looking at canine drak all the kids knew him they all fed them they loved them our current canine is um is a little younger and is a different breed and can and really is not in the schools um so when we go read to the kids and those sorts of things like that canine would not be the kind of canine that you would bring into the schools um but this one would be and it would be one that would really bring us out into the community make us more approachable and um i would just travel around with the officer community right right and we would do it with current staff the idea would be to take one of our school officers broaden their perspective

135so it wasn't just schools um and kind of realigned to allow them to be able to go out and do a lot more of these community events and functions so and you one of the things that we've talked about this for a while now but you've talked to a couple of chiefs that you know well and that they have the dogs and why don't you talk a little bit about that so chief dooley is a close friend of mine he used to be a chief in orange connecticut and we go i've known him for over 20 years and very well respected um i i respect his opinion and his advice um chief l.j fazaro from groton same thing they have comfort dogs and they say it's the best thing they've done in the last 15

136years so these are two chiefs that you would go to kind of to say and and that's why and they say it's just the morale and the police department but also the community involvement has just been unbelievable um and it's been way more than they even could have imagined so um you know that and that's why in talking about this i don't take it lightly i mean you haven't seen many new proposals from me about many things right the things that i bring forward are things that i truly believe in that are gonna work i wouldn't bring it to you if it didn't and so this is one of those things that after talking to these communities and chiefs and seeing the impact i think it would be phenomenal for our agency and the community

137so are you asking for the funding for this budget correct okay so it's not in the budget and so the the good thing is is that the training is done the dog is actually donated to us and basically what we have to do because of labor laws pay one hour a day for an officer to care for it now it's minimum wage it's not an officer's salary so that's where the funding comes in for that and the food and that's it and you said about between eight and ten thousand dollars correct and then um and my thought was and i don't know how what the full budget's gonna look like but eight or ten thousand dollars out of the whole large budget we could probably find without making any changes to the budget but um

138because of but that said it is a new service it's a new employee so i wanted to you know make sure that if there was an interest in that that we could middletown does is there they have canine bear who's become like a mascot in middletown every business it's on every business instagram post every school is hugged and kissed every day by somebody in that town and i think it really exactly what you said i would i think it makes a lot of sense yes yeah and yeah you wouldn't want to hug our current canine but no i got that i have other videos for that officer o'donnell's uh the football game and i would not want to hug that yeah yeah that's and i can personally attest to being k9 drax handler that it

139opened up so many doors in my career with that dog in this town community school to go into classrooms to see those kids light up and smile teachers um morale like you said the pd everybody like to see that dog whether he goes there to work or just to hang out and sit by your side it was uh something to really behold and like you said chief to be walking on the parade and everybody screaming out that dog's name you said we didn't have to be there that dog could just did what he wanted to do and he had everybody's support so i think this is a great idea and i would love to see that come to fruition other questions let's vote so look it's it's you're always talking about the tools in the

140toolbox and what are the effective tools we have it sounds like this is a good win so we'll come back to it come back yeah talk about it yeah okay great good and i um oh communications uh page 40. do we need a ta oh yeah i'm sorry t.a police department 31-39 39 i'm sorry yes i'd like to make a motion to ta pages 31 through 39 of the town manager's proposed budget second motion a second any further discussions seeing none all in favor aye aye opposed motion passing now what pages communications 40 thank you yeah page 40. that's just our dispatch center that's usually included but um and there's really no change in uh our dispatcher's flat the only i mean the only difference is their contract was settled right so exactly and that's

141just page 40. any questions on the page here make a motion to temporarily approve page 40 of the town manager's proposed budget second i have a motion a second any further questions seeing none all in favor all right opposed motion passing and then page 41 is our ems service that's to provide uh coverage for paramedics and ambulance and that's a contract contracted out service oh the seam i'm sorry i'm wrong that's a c mech you can explain what that is paul so that so by law we have to pay this amount it's our portion it's the way that the ambulances communicate with the hospitals when they're going in so it's called cmed that's the frequency so when they're coming in that's how they communicate with the doctors to let them know sometimes they get orders

142paramedics whether they can uh use certain narcotics and that sort of thing and cmed is the frequency so the state is the one that sends us the um the bill for it and that's been our constant bill any questions i'd like to make a motion to temporarily approve page 41 of the tom manager's proposed budget second promotion a second any further comments saying none all in favor aye aye and that's it thank you chief thank you thank you thank you thanks can i come back and be that handler our next is uh the library and they come on up and they are on page 17 and we'll put their video on for a minute their presentation and how are you guys doing good i'll be getting out of your way let me just get to

143age 17 as you can see on page 17 this is a page that you guys support non-profit organizations and you can see on page 17 3 down is the library grant so they're part of this page my recommended um amount is two million eight hundred and thirty seven thousand two hundred and thirty five dollars and that is a two point seven four percent increase above uh what the last year's budget was how i came to that number is that i matched it with the town operations and my increase was 2.74 so that's what that number was so i will on that turn it over to you guys and thank you okay good evening everyone thanks for your time i think i know almost all of you i'm jory andrews the current chair of the library

144board this is chris lindquist our executive director uh i know we we definitely know most of you so we're pleased that see things seem to be getting back to normal at the libraries now you know even the last few days of my office it's full of people again and things are things are things are happening so for the just a few it's coming there we go great thanks scott great so could do we have a control yeah so here is our fiscal year proposed fiscal year 2023 budget you'll see at the top our total budget is this 3105 figure it's about a 3.7 increase from last year but we know the town budget is tight we didn't want to ask for anything more than anyone else so we have uh reduced our request to the

1452.74 that matches the uh the town figures at this point and the difference will be made up by the fvgla and just controlling some expenses the predominant portion of the increases at this point in time has related to health insurance costs which continue to go up you know annually so we're having to deal with that we do have a few more full-time employees we're balancing out full-time and part-time employees that we had to supply medical insurance for so that's why our figure was a little higher than it's been for prior years so if you take a look at this budget the uh 2.837 2 837 figure is what kathy was recommending at the 2.74 increase you'll see that the fvgla our parent you know organization since we're an associated association library not owned by the

146town is next they're increasing their contribution by about thirty thousand dollars so that's a sixteen percent increase then we have a grant from lci that's the library connection inc we're moving the library services back to the service called the library connection that deals with a lot of towns in our vicinity a number of years ago we had gone to a stand-alone service which um had been recommended by johnston years ago that was a little cheaper but it put us we found really isn't a cost savings and the community's been asking us to be back with the other connection the other connection does is they transfer books between member libraries at no charge to us when we were a stand-alone we had to make a staff person working full-time making phone calls to another library saying

147can i get this book for someone then someone had to drive there to get it so it ended up that it really wasn't a cost savings so the library connection as part of us are signing back up with them is giving us a grant of the cost for the first year so that we have that grant the only area in which we're showing our income going down is the other income that is predominantly we are proposing this year as of january to eliminate fines it's a growing trend across the country a lot of people are finding that you know if they see fines as an impediment to people taking out books and there are studies that show that it really doesn't affect the percentage of books that are actually returned to the library we ultimately

148do get them back anyway so chris can speak to that a little bit more if you have questions but that ends up totaling the 2.74 increase that we're asking for for the current year um over the course of the last year we've dealt with a lot of hybrid services still but we're really able to get back to full services now the library is open full time all the hours that we previously were over the last year we've increased we have some figures we'll show you for high increases for reference and electronic books which increased drastically during covit and our librarians spent a lot of time helping people around town with the reference services whether it was job hunting or reference because they couldn't be freely roaming the library but we're now moving back to full-time

149there we've reorganized some of the personnel in a more logical way we've added a branch manager at the barney library so there is somebody there who is responsible all the time and we don't have to keep sending a librarian running from the main branch over to the barney whenever there's an issue so that's all worked out pretty well um last i think overall comment i'd like to give you is we've been very active in getting some new committees active on the library over the course of the last year to to plan for things including our capital planning committee you know this year we put a membrane roof on the library we're redesigning the children's rooms so it better serves the children's area because we have a massive number and high attendance in children's programs we

150have a technology committee who's helping us with be a little more proactive about planning when we replace equipment rather than just reacting to when something breaks down and needing replacement a personnel committee that we needed a lot during covid to develop new policies and we have an art committee that hopefully will be able to start running some things and events at the barney library again and in our community room as we're able to bring people back in more and the farmington room committee is digitizing a lot of the farmington historic history that we had to to preserve it so that it's available online for uh for patrons so that's just a brief overview and i thought maybe chris you could run through the uh quickly we won't take too much of your time yep so

151um thank you jory and and i just wanted to say that that's a tough act to follow when you're following um a presentation with adorable uh labrador retrievers i can't follow that but but i'll do my best and so i appreciate the opportunity uh to just talk about uh some of the uh usage this past year so i think the operative word from the past year is adaptability and and i can't say enough about our staff and our board and uh their uh willingness to adapt uh as needed uh due to the pandemic so as you might expect i mean because we were closed part of the time uh this past fiscal year and we reopened on a kind of a phased-in plan our building visits are down significantly and you can see the building

152visits from the past couple of fiscal years uh items borrowed also down significantly because we again we're primarily providing services in curbside pickup and and grab and go where people would be able to come in the lobby but not stay in the library to browse our collections and and be served by our staff so those areas are obviously down but they are down in libraries across the nation obviously because of covet the the area which jory mentioned where uh borrowing is up significantly is electronic borrowing and so for those of you who don't know we have an amazing array of electronic resources that you can access via our website 24 7 and a lot of our uh you know electronic increase was due to the pandemic so people were at home not able to come

153to the library physically but they were able to you know read an e-book or you know borrow an e-video or an e-audio and so that uh that that borrowing went up about 38 uh this past year in the other areas again you know because of our uh you know need to be closed due to the pandemic programs were you know the number was down the attendance was down i will say however that we were offering a lot of remote programs so virtual programs via zoom we did some pre-recorded uh programs and as you can see at the bottom of the slide those were up about 102 so it actually increased from the prior fiscal year fy 20 the number of people who are viewing pre-recorded programs and as i mentioned you know the reference assistance

154that was needed went up significantly so even though we had an increase um the prior year it went up to uh 75 000 uh reference inquiries which is phenomenal about an 80 percent increase and that was due in primarily to the fact that people needed more assistance in in accessing some of the electronic resources using whatever device they were using whether it was an iphone or a you know a tablet or a laptop or perhaps a desktop and then you know finding out what are the steps in order to actually download write an e-resource onto their device so i can't say enough about our reference staff uh amazing um efforts on their part to continue to engage people and and uh you know allow them to borrow materials despite the pandemic so this again just

155kind of gives you the content in terms of the uh libraries in connecticut it gives you some context in terms of how libraries within the state were impacted by the pandemic program attendance obviously was down as i mentioned library visits was down circulation was down and in our case we kind of bucked the trend because our electronic resources the borrowing was was just sky high um and and i attribute that really to the fact that we do promote those electronic resources and and in this community um i think you know people uh were determined to to continue to uh take advantage of those resources and they were calling our reference staff and finding out how to access those materials so that was uh you know kind of um i i guess the silver lining uh

156to to the to the pandemic uh the next slide is just a little more context so um you know we we work with the state library we work with the connecticut library consortium our our peers within the state and um you know the the state of connecticut put out a kind of a a message with respect to how statewide services work during covet and they talk about the dampening effect of covet on library services and the impact on programs you know circulation reference the number of people using a public computer because many of the libraries were closed for a period of time interlibrary loan all that usage was down in our case we kind of bucked the trend because our electronic circulation was up significantly about 28.3 percent versus 23.9 percent uh in the state

157and again our reference inquiries grew by more than 80 percent and in addition uh the first bullet uh noted notes that our kind of the number of library programs and recordings at our libraries um was up 58 so that people were still being engaged children teens and adults were still attending you know programs uh via zoom during that time period and and the next slide is just i've got a few slides here that kind of give you uh a comparison with our peer group and our peer group includes avon simsbury ridgefield newington glastonbury we consider those our peers farmington again is kind of the head of the pack in terms of the number of reference questions that our reference staff answered ebook circulation were again uh leading leading that uh peer group uh children's materials

158uh the circulation of our of all of our materials and we're the highest in the peer group in terms of uh the number of materials that we can attribute to children's circulation so again our children's uh you know kind of collections are noted a lot of libraries borrow from us because we've got such a fantastic uh collection in our children's room young adult materials also uh you know quite high during that fiscal year and and i'm just showing you a few slides about how we compared the expenditure on children's materials as well as our children's book collection per capita it's one of the largest uh collections in terms of our children's uh book uh resources within our peer group and really within the state it's one of the largest collections available in terms of children's

159fiction and non-fiction and then we kind of show you some of the other statistical usage with respect to downloadable audio so that was also we were highest in terms of our peer group as well as e-media circulation as i mentioned so those are just kind of giving you some um comparison with other libraries one of the new services i'm happy to talk about is we've just installed about two weeks ago something called laptops to go it's it's kind of a a self-service kiosk that's in our main library at the main library uh in the lobby and it was paid for by arpa funds so that was part of the arpa funding that we received from the federal government and we can now loan out laptops self-service you come in with your library card and you

160can borrow a laptop for a week and you can return it to that kiosk and you know it's it's being uh widely used is popular and i expect the demand will continue to grow um and you know once we uh if we if there are future funds available we might want to put one over at the barney library so it's uh it's a great you know kind of service um for those who don't have a laptop so jory mentioned that we are planning to eliminate uh overdue fines and we probably all grew up going to the library and having to maybe occasionally pay an overdue fine it's a very outmoded uh philosophy that's kind of a 20th century philosophy so now in the 21st century more and more libraries are eliminating overdue fines as jory

161mentioned it doesn't really incentivize somebody to return a book 99.8 percent of the time people return books on time um and so you know a 10 percent overdue fine is not going to incentivize somebody so we really want to eliminate the barriers to access we want to provide access to all of our resources and we don't want overdue fines to be a barrier in any sense part of kind of equity and inclusion and diversity a lot of libraries have already eliminated fines and we're i'm happy to say that the board supported are eliminating it as of january of next year and you can kind of see the trend uh towards uh uh find free uh going fine free and that will be simultaneous with our rejoining the consortium so the consortium as jory mentioned includes

162libraries in the greater hartford area we were part of the consortium i think about a dozen years ago and then the former library director uh pulled out of the consortium went with a standalone called koha um we have since i've been here a year and a half gotten a lot of inquiries from our patrons and from other directors at other libraries in the consortium saying when are you going to come back to the consortium so i'm happy to say we are rejoining it as of january and that you know people will have access to all the libraries about 30 libraries in that network they'll have access to all of those resources within the network via you know the computers in in our library so you can imagine all the interlibrary loan that will be happening

163you know we'll be sending materials to other libraries and other libraries will be requesting the materials from our library so it's going to go up significantly these slides are just you know some happy slides i guess kind of competing with uh the video of the labrador retriever so this is our show-and-tell so just you know amazing children's programs again primarily we were doing a lot of online uh programs during the pandemic we did do some outdoor programs when possible during good weather um and in some cases we're able to do small programs within our main community room at the library can't say enough about the quality of the programs that we provide our children's teen and adult services staff do an amazing job continuing to engage people um despite the pandemic and so these are

164just some photos of the grab and go and the make and take crafts that we made available so that people could come in and you know continue to be engaged in in in programs despite again uh being closed to the public part of the time teen services we have a new team librarian she's already been working with uh you know teachers at the high school in the middle school we have teens that are part of a teen advisory board um she's engaging them in reading books and they've been doing some teen book reviews that are also available online uh we're known for our garminy music series programs hopefully some of you have been able to attend some of those programs we like to do them over at the lawn on the lawn of the barney

165library and hoping to continue to start or at least start to do those this coming summer and fall so these are just some other photos of outdoor events that we were able to do during during the pandemic including some book discussion groups over at the barney library and some nature programs outside as well as a outdoor story walk and you know anything that we could do outside in a safe way we were we were able to do so in terms of adult programs again we did primarily online uh you know virtual programs but we did do some programs uh for small groups and uh these are just some photos of some of those programs and finally our patrons tell us that you know they really really appreciated our efforts to go above and beyond during

166the pandemic to continue to provide materials that they were interested in uh whether they were physical books or you know resources or e-resources and so these are just some quotes from parents and uh some avid readers we call them the unionville sisters but two particular readers in unionville that were very very uh gracious in their comments and thanking us for all that our staff did during the pandemic to continue to provide recreational reading for them and that's all i have so i'm happy to take any questions tori and i are here to answer any questions you may have great thank you keith thank you for coming and uh for your presentation i know that um you were very receptive to um councils um uh wanting to be very tight on this budget given what's going

167on with community with the high school and everything and i really i know that was a lot of work and i really appreciate you guys uh putting that together for us thank you thank you one question i had been uh asked was i think i know a lot of this is pandemic related and i think we're coming out of it the some of the children's set up in the main branch yeah um that had been it's come down with uh with with kobut is some of that going to be reinstituted and are we looking forward to yes great question and i believe you may have kids that i really want to frequent the children's room so that's probably why you're asking something yes and that is uh actually the case and part of the reason

168that there have been some changes uh despite kovid we're also planning for a complete redesign of the children's space so those changes you'll be seeing them end of april early may we're getting some new furnishings new shelving and a complete redesign of that space so we've been working with the designer over the past year and i'm happy to say that you know by may you'll you'll see those changes we also did during covet need to take away some of the the play toys yeah i told totally understand i don't know you know in speaking with other parents with you know oh yes it's great to have you know two hours over the night absolutely i know that the community is really looking forward to getting that it's going to be an amazing project um and

169we're getting some uh support from the fvgla towards that project as well and um you know it's going to be we have people that come here from other communities you know surrounding communities that love the children's room at the main library so i know it's going to be exceptionally popular right yeah what they're doing right now the librarian's desk in the children's room is over on one side and we have the activities for the different kids are like mixed so you'll have like two-year-olds in one area who may be walking through the teen area to get to the eight-year-old area for their brothers or sisters so we're moving the main desk to the middle of the room so the librarians can see what's going on and observe everything exactly and the activities as we renovate

170are being regrouped so kids activities for younger ages are in one area the tweed the teens are upstairs but the tweens then have their own corner where they're not right next to the little kids with the two-year-olds running through yeah we call them age-appropriate zones so it's kind of different zones and again the tweens don't want to be anywhere near the younger ones right they want to have their own space and they do they have a cool space but it's going to be kind of separate so great it'll be it'll be quite quite an experience once we have it all developed so thank you brian i just wanted to add that i thought that your community outreach programming during covid like the mind body spirit uh series that you did at uh uh where did

171you where did that so we were working with hartford healthcare also had kind of a partnership uh with us and we're providing some uh you know online programs with health and wellness and and and i know brian you know we're looking forward to working with you and live well as well uh hoping to provide some uh you know kind of educational programs regarding dementia and cognitive issues and uh perhaps someday i'm hoping that we can develop a memory cafe libraries are providing that kind of a memory cafe now during covet obviously probably was difficult i know you did some that were virtual in nature we're hoping to actually do a physical memory cafe once a month perhaps you know at the main library so looking forward to working with you on that on that initiative

172so i'm my kids are now aged out but we've really fond memories of the horse in the library because you get your little token and then you'd go so i'm all about the saturday morning if i could deposit my kids there i really would but my question is about going fine free and a 12 year old me is celebrating right now because i was that kid i was about in that two percent who had a very hefty hefty library um debit so do you think that you'll need additional funds for more volumes of books for example like maybe high schoolers when they have a project due or for a specific book do you see potentially needing extra copies of books because now you have gone fine free so kids can take these books out and

173sure maybe not be that i appreciate the question so it's interesting because once we rejoin the consortium we're going to have access to millions of you know titles that we don't currently have at least easy access to so within a day we'll be able to access you know a title that may be very popular you know through the the network from surrounding libraries so i don't think that's going to be an issue but we do particularly with popular books like bestsellers we'll order five copies of of a best-selling title normally so and if we get such demand that we need to order some additional copies we we will do that for best selling items i guess it depends on on what the title is and how much in demand it is okay but i i

174so one of the things that you know i think we're we're noticing is that more and more people are using the electronic resources when you have electronic e-books you know it's unlimited typically you know you can have 50 people uh borrowing one title whereas if you had a physical book that would be you know so they'd have to get in in queue so to speak and put that book on hold so i think you know usage is changing in that respect and it will continue to change i'm still the kind of person that likes pages as am i as am i yeah chris presented some information to the board when we were reviewing the proposal and it's interesting there have been studies that you really don't get much bigger a percentage of any loss of

175books if you go if you go find free yeah we know that some people again it could be a barrier i mean you know if if they can't afford to pay a 50 fine and then their card is blocked and they stop using the library that's the last thing we want we want people to be accessing the resources and using the library i'm all for full access but i think also just being prepared should sure for example you need multiple copies of the books but going to the consortium seems like it would be a workaround to that issue i believe that is the case yeah we kind of aligned it so that we would eliminate the fines as we were rejoining the consortium just to comment but uh so someone who's probably only frequent in

176the library as a young person maybe on my hand i can count it more of a numbers person my that being said i i can't say enough about the programs you've had for children i've got a few of them my wife has frequented those uh programs in the past and my children probably walk over from our house at least once a week to check out books so i'm one of those households now that has a stack that's got to go back uh and it's got to go back every thursday because that's the only way we keep track so i just want to say thank you that's great we appreciate it thank you i've given credit to the friends we didn't mention the friends too but we have a very active friends group there and the

177fundraising from the friends basically pays for almost all the children's programming for the year so that's not an out of pocket in our budget because we get the donations from the friends to support those programs yeah and their primary fundraising activities book sales obviously and during the pandemic they weren't really doing that but i believe they're planning one next fall so they are still planning to do them and provide funding for children's programs as well as museum passes things like that we can't thank the friends enough another question yeah you did mention about being open and inclusive to everybody so is there a fee to get a library card there is no fee no if you're a resident of the town you can get a library card and for the ebooks and stuff is there

178a fee for that stuff no fee no so as long as you have a library card you can borrow em e materials uh no fee at all excellent so obviously with the e material you have it for a week and that just shuts off well and yes in some cases you can renew it depends on the item but you know some items you can renew some items there is no renewal it really depends on what the item is okay it's usually more like two or three weeks it's like the regular book borrowing period of time and we do have some limitations because you do pay by the number of people who do it unfortunately the big book selling companies don't give libraries discounts we end up buying books at relatively high rates they were not

179allowed to buy from an amazon or something but um so they basically give you like a license number so if the book type yes you get five licenses there are licensing agreements and right now i think the publishing industry has changed a lot because of electronic books and i think there's five or six major publishers and they kind of command you know whatever it is the license agreements are and and you know they they negotiate with states and it depends on the licensing agreement essentially about how many uh uh you know e-titles can be borrowed at one time or if they can be renewed we're continuing to kind of work with our state colleagues to kind of try and push you know the publishers in the direction of you know giving libraries a break they

180haven't so far and my last would be for the uh your new laptop program that you're doing is there a fee for that there is no fee so yeah do you tie a credit card up are you taking a deposit someone's deciding and i appreciate the question so up top some of our peer libraries have already started loaning laptops and i'm happy to say that most of the time the laptops come back in good condition and they're returned on time we are going to you know give it a six month kind of test period and see how this goes we are not requiring a deposit we're not requiring a credit card we're going to see how this goes and if we need to you know review our policies at the end of the six-month trial

181period we will do that but right now we're not requiring a deposit all right there are a lot of additional services at no charge to like we have museum passes people who when they want to go to any local museum can come pick one up at the library and borrow it and not have to pay admission fees um lots of programs yeah very popular and again you know i can't say enough about the support of the board and also uh the town manager and she is the best town manager in connecticut and i appreciate the fact that we are being you know funded at the 2.74 percent i realized that the high school project is a significant driver of the budgets but um we are doing the you know as as best as we can

182with with the uh uh you know support from the town so i appreciate that with that that's one more are you working in collaboration with the high school with their library and stuff so right so like a heads up hey we're going this way we need a b and c absolutely and and our staff uh both our our teen librarian and our children's librarian work and and meet with the school librarians you know i think relatively um closely and uh you know i think we're we're trying to determine what it is that they would like us to do during the high school project we know that more and more students will be coming to the library they obviously come right to the library after school but there are going to be certain i'm sure impacts

183from the construction over two years and they'll be needing some resources perhaps computers space to to meet and collaborate so we're going to be you know talking about that with with the high school as well great thank you yeah and we uh we have trustees who serve rolling like three or four year terms so one of the trustees we added this year is the head guidance counselor at the high school kate martirelli so she's provided some really good input there any other question well thank you the library always does a tremendous job in town it's always on the top of the list of one of the uh thank you benefits to being in farmington i'd love to see it back open it was a tough two years for everyone and throughout i think you had

184some creative uses during that so thank you and you mentioned the friends the friends do a great job for you i know that so thank you for coming in thank you so much thank you very much thank you ta yes i'd like to make a motion to temporarily approve the farmington library's 2022-2023 budget second you have a motion in a second any further questions seeing none all in favor all right i opposed most passionately thank you we will now take a brief break because i think we're a little past our dinner time okay 7-eleven we are back kathy um so cj we and the group we have basically have gone through our schedule for today on wednesday march 9th we have three more items to cover to go through the entire budget it would be

185the benefits section debt and non-tax revenues the way we've been going if people are up for it i would say that we could get through those three items tonight and then tomorrow would be kind of just a recap of everything and discussion that sounds very nobody has any place to go because they plan on being here for another three hours so i think we're good party two hours overtime we were playing all the time over time i was thinking about four years ago all right so we'll start on benefits and that is the blue tab in the back of the book page 66 66 and 67. so this account has gone up uh 4.6 um i think we just talked a little bit about the pension account so the pension account is in the benefits

186has been increased due to the reduction in the assumed rate of return on the pension investments from 6.875 to 6.75 percent and if people that have been on the council before and remember that the pension board is slowly asking us to start um reducing um the the rate of return um again it doesn't seem like much but it's a big number every time we reduce it so we've been doing it every year um so that part of that uh 4.7 in the benefits is because of that uh reduction because the account correct me if i'm wrong joe is actually doing quite well the benefits account right yeah so that pension account so um so that's part of that and this also has our uh 401s in the account right the yeah the pension account does

187it funds two different things the people who are in the defining benefit plan which is the old retirement pension account that we had and that was basically anybody hired prior to 2012 or any police or fire fire firefighter in other words the the old pension account is closed to anybody to all employees except police employees and fire employees since 2012. so there's two um so the first part is the largest part actually is the contribution and there's the people in the 401 plan which basically what happens is there's a match the town matches the employees at six percent in place required to contribute six percent to the defined contribution plan match that six percent six percent of your your base salary um it's not your total earnings just your base salary that of that 4.5

188million dollars that's showing there up 300 000 is the contribution to the defined contribution to the defined benefit and you can see on the page 66 the other items that are in the account the social security the pension the health insurance life and disability insurance unemployment tuition employee assistance workers comp and heart and hypertension so those are accounts and even though the four percent it's a big number these accounts have in the past have really been driven very high so this is actually rather stable especially with the fact that we've been we've been lowering the rate of return health insurance has gone up we didn't have a great year this year we've had some really good years in the last couple years so that usually happens that you have a bad year this hasn't been

189a great year is it due to covet or just other factors no it's the combination of part of the student code when kobe did obviously nobody went to the hospitals nobody went to the doctors other than for covet so there's a lot of delay in medical procedures and that's coming coming out now but a lot of it is catch struck what we call catastrophic claims it's just basically people people in the plant who've had large claims due to cancer or major illnesses that's driving the number right now it's fairly cyclical in terms you'll go through three or four years of large claims and then it will level off or actually decline and then it will jump up again um what the other part of the thing that we're catching with this is because of code

190because we have people weren't going to the doctors when the actuary does the contribution calculation they based it on claims based on prior claims medical inflation things like that so we didn't have when nicole looked really good so the actuaries said well you know your cleanse is really good obviously this kind of sum up recovery but our numbers dropped a few two years actually the year we're living in um right now our claims experience was so good the prior year that our numbers went down our contribution went down so if there was a false decline it went down and now because things are back to normal pretty much then there are some catch traffic claims out there numbers that jumped up again all right and one last for heart and hypertension is that something that

191would be phased out like i know like for police officers hired after such and such a date they don't have access to that claim anymore yeah well the problem is there's still people who were hired before that day okay so that stays with you for i thought okay so it doesn't just phase out after retirement the majority of that amount that's budgeted there is for a police officer's widow police officer passed away about 20 years ago so it's you know it's with you and so until that part gotcha that's it for uh fringe benefits there has there ever been discussion about uh doing uh the defined contribution for fire and police i know you said 2012 there was a transition obviously this probably goes back way before a lot of us but has there ever

192been discussion on that end or is that something that's negotiated with the contracts when they when they come up i just because i'm new here i don't know sure yeah it's definitely negotiated with the contracts um we as the town and i still support the the position is that have not felt that um there's still a lot of most police departments still have a defined benefit i mean a defined yeah benefit debt fine benefit and for recruitment purposes and things like that if you don't have that you're not going to recruit the best of the best so back then when we changed over we made a determination not to change the police over at that time and i still feel that that's probably where we should be understood in the fire contract they actually have

193an option between a defined benefit and a defined compensation but they choose the pension more times than not the defined contribution as the chief actually said it before we've attracted three teammates from other three officers some other departments who were defined contribution plans with our firefighters too they have the option but usually the ones who take the defined contribution plan are the ones that don't stay here alone okay so the ones who um you know they pretty much turn over four to five years at the time we did close the plan it was negotiated with some of the unions the police union did negotiate substantial changes to their pension uh formula so that made it more in action one of the things they did that was a big benefit at the time was that they

194capped their benefit so people hired after 2012 their benefits capped at like 65 of their base salary so it's and that was one of the kind of points with the council back then that if they were going to keep the police pension they had to make changes to the pension plan and they did make changes to the pension plan and so i think it's worked out on both sides and when you're uh when you're talking divine defined benefit does the same rules apply when you know you turn 67 and no you go to medicare no no okay so that would be in this in the private industry you know you know if you have someone on payroll that reaches the age of 67 they go off of the the company payroll or the company um

195health insurance plan and they go into medicare and that kind of thing no um [Laughter] here at work as part of my work responsibilities saying hey you know this guy just turned 65 does he um uh is he still on your health insurance and just remind you that your primary he was secondary so um so yeah i mean that basically happens here i hate to really say it but we don't have too many people over 65 at this point i think i'm like probably the second oldest person in the town working for the town right now okay you don't look it [Laughter] yeah so that's uh it for uh benefits 66 and 67 yep any other questions like to make a motion to temporarily accept pages 66 and 66 67 of the tom manager's 2022-2023

196budget second motion a second any further discussion hearing none all in favor all right opposed to motion passing joe next yeah so if you just quickly we're going to do debt but just if everyone just just to go to the front page of the budget just so we can just show the tax and budget worksheet so on the expenditure side we've gone through the education we've gone through the town we're now going to talk about the debt number and the debt number as you can see on the front page is 9306 656 which is an increase of 103. one million 34 0309 it's a 12.50 percent and then the debt is on in the back on page 68 and then joe will go through that as you can see on page 68 we take release

197financing we pay bond interest buying principal and our clean water fund loans at least financing numbers are for two long-term leases we have they're actually both energy performance leases one was when we purchased the street lights the other ones were the energy conservation improvements we did in throughout town in 2012 those numbers are slow those numbers actually will be relatively stable for the next 10 years and then they'll drop off suddenly however dramatically bonded interest and bonded principle that's for our long-term debt and there's a substantial increase here and as council may recall about a month or so ago i indicated that we would be selling 40 million dollars in long-term bonds we did that on february 23rd we actually we did that that was what we were supposed to do according to the financial

198forecast we're supposed to do 20 million dollars this year because of the threat of interest rates climbing and actually we're seeing interest rates climbing pretty significantly uh first couple first six weeks of january uh february first six weeks of the year um we doubled it to 40 million instead of the 20 million dollars try to capture some of the lower interest rates and we were fairly successful we ended up with a 2.38 true interest cost on the loans there were 20 years and actually it's a based on what was happening around us at the time with other communities it's actually a pretty good rate and i have to say that you know one of the unfortunate one of the good things if there are any good things of the conflict over in europe was that

199we basically sold a couple of days after the invasion of ukraine and the markets really scrambled at that point and we just caught it right and everybody was looking for safe safe places to put their money so we ended up actually that 40 million dollar issue we ended up with 10 bids you know which is pretty significant yeah 10 10 investment returns wanting your money you know at that point in time so it really worked out for the time it really worked out well for the town so we have that built into this budget and you'll see the principal payment on that each year will be if you look on the opposite side in this schedule you'll see a line that says 2022 bond issue 20 years the 2.38 interest rate and then um principal

200principal payments starting next year with two million dollars and the interest payment is 557 thousand dollars let's get a caveat of that um in order to get to an interest rate of 2.38 we got a substantial premium from the investment from the buyers of the bonds to premiums is they basically paid us money so instead of tomorrow we're going to close on this debt which means we'll actually get the money tomorrow it'll actually be transferred into our county and they're going to basically wire us 40 million dollars plus another 2.5 million dollars that 2.5 million dollars is to be used to help us pay the interest that they're charging us so basically they're giving us the money we're going to give it back to them over the next 20 years so that's what's helping keep

201that number down low for next year that 2.5 million dollars will be spread out over three years you know it will go against the interest costs over the next three years so three years so now that number will start to creep up again you'll start to see your debt servicing increase on the interest side of it so it really works out for us this year it's kind of like everything worked together for this bond it should make it a pretty good bond district and then the other issue that uh other thing that we pay here is when we um did the upgrade to the treatment plan we took out clean water loans for two percent and that's what that category is we have three loans out there and we're paying back on those and the

202interest or the payments on those will total almost three million dollars next year you know we'll talk about in a couple of minutes on the revenue side we actually receive about 700 000 back from different towns and users of the plant they're they're assessed a levy or an investment to help us pay for this debt service so we do get some revenue on the off money on the revenue side so i'll set that three million dollars it's almost paying the interest basically because you have interest listed at 777. it's slightly less than the interest that's pretty much the i think uh joe is being a little bit modest about the the rate and how everything went it really you couldn't have asked for it to go any better and how we took on that much

203debt and able to afford it and you know with the whole school project and i think it should you know joe really manages our finances but if you look here we're paying for a brand new treatment plan you're paying we've taking on 40 million dollars more on a school project which was double what we were planning on doing it and you all know we haven't talked about it yet what the tax rate is and so he really joe has done a spectacular job just managing our financing and you know just the timing of this i know some of it was not you didn't do the timing exactly with the the ukraine stuff but really how it was all planned out is really really fabulous or did he joe what was your uh when we were

204going through the high school project what was the assumption on your uh interest rates i think you had it climbing up of the three years we were looking at um we looked at the overall number of deductions that we averaged it out about so one of the things one of the unknowns is always not just what the markets are looking for but how much of a premium you can get back on you know they're going to give you back um on this so we were a little cautious on on the forecast and saying we were being three percent and actually the week before we did this we're just doing some forecasting we're looking at the way the trend was gone we thought we did like 2.7.65 2.7 on this issue so when it did come

205in at three 2.38 it was your atmosphere you're pleased with that you're seeing about a 25 basis point increase each each week so we actually i was actually getting a little panicky about the whole thing because of the way the at the point a week before the sale um the town sold in connecticut and they sold very similar to us there were there was an s p triple a they were a 20-year 35 million dollar school bondership and they sold for 2.55 the true true interest cost so that's very similar to what other than the malicious group we have the moody's rating as opposed to the s p rating so it was we were thinking of 2.7 2.65 2.7 so it's coming in at the 2.38 very very pleased with the two million five that's

206coming back to us right that's very good thank you that's great uh questions on the death service ed uh yeah i just have a question um i'm seeing two different numbers um so on page 68 for the total of uh the department request total for 2022 2023 i see 352 and then if we go to the previous page that has the summary um i see um nine million nine hundred thousand thirty and eighteen dollars so i was wondering which one was the actual department request oh i think this one on the so that was that number was actually prior to what would actually occur that's what we would have been you know if unfortunately my forecast was true that's what the number would have been 9.2 the difference there is the bond interest that they're

207requesting that had the 9.2 the difference is the bond interest and hobo tilt the premium there's always a debate with when you receive premium and would like you to take it all at once or as close as possible to all at once and finance directors don't like to do that and water like it even less they could do that so basically um the compromise the original thought was we would take we would go to a certain level and then i decided that i didn't want to do that i wanted to stretch it out a little further so i'm like two and a half years just over two and a half years like 2.7 years as opposed to um two years or anything less than that so so that's basically why the department the main interest

208numbers are different you notice that the found interest on the department request is 962 of the managers on that other page that's that was a premium and a higher interest rate gotcha okay and notice that that number is actually at the front of the book as well okay i just happened to notice that yep thanks for the explanation so i have a question about the cash that we got back the two and a half million dollars you said that that should take us out about three years so how does that fit into the overall picture of what we told residents to expect with the bonding for the new high school building so i think was it 2022 2023 was supposed to be the high point of what we were supposed to see so that's still

209accurate right given this or if everything goes according to plan i should say yeah it really depends now how fast how quickly we spend this 40 million dollars okay um you guys could have well if i knew it was going to come with you i probably would have paid 60 million dollars in bonds because you could take you know i mean i come in here and say well instead of a 1.6 tax increase it's a two three percent tax increase and still additional sixty million dollars and get you know that's half of the authorization i mean so basically what's gonna happen is how quickly we spend the forty million dollars how quickly we need another bond sale what the interest rates are at that point and how big a premium we may get at that

210point so you know after the budget's said and done basically sit down and redo the forecast based on what just occurred to see where that next hit may come okay so that timeline is pretty much it's again it's pretty much um my guess is that it probably will not be as big it will probably be a year later and it won't be as big as we thought it would be okay because we've issued you know double the amount of debt right now you know it probably will delay us again our next debt issue is supposed to be next february or january chances are i mean how much how quickly the money spent by the contractors that may be march or april or next year which could delay you know push up the payments also for

211my vague recollection it was 20 million and then 40 million like the biggest one was the middle um the middle bond whatever that year that fell in i thought that was 2023 maybe yeah something like that so we basically um we changed it up a little bit here and the next foundation may only be 20 again depending on how much money we need okay so it may instead of being another 40 maybe 20 or maybe 40. it's really hard to say at this point we've only at this point in time we've actually spent about i mean i had to just do this for the irs we've actually spent about two and a half million dollars of the 135 million dollars which kind of surprised me we haven't seen anything at this point why the planning

212yeah but that was part of the plan that two million dollars yes okay just just just to get that in the record yes you look you said no grounds broken you know there's no steel going up so you're not spending any money but you've actually spent two and a half million dollars but joe in general all things being relatively equal us bonding more money is probably going to help your for your what your forecast is it's not making it the work the other way it's helping get the forecast this will i think this will make the forecast a lot better yeah yeah i think there were some uh folks when we had the referendum meetings and one of the things they talked about was instead of doing the bonding as you staggered it 20 40

21320 or whatever it is at the end um that you you should sort of try and take advantage of those interest rates so i think they'll be happy with that and then there was also the idea of making it a longer term and then there were reasons why that was not possible given our town and the bond rating and such thank you well there's some yeah there's gone 30 years some thought of actually doing this at 15 years again which is our normal practice and 30 years probably driven up the number quite a bit on the interest rate number quite a bit and i think 15 years probably would have shortened would lower the interest rate quite a bit i know that especially in this environment rising rates you don't want to buy you don't

214want to lock yourself into a 2.38 bonds for 20 years when you know rates three years from now it might be five percent for all you know it's unlikely but they might be so people don't want to watch this so people don't have an appetite to lock themselves in for 30 years and even at a 3 or a 3 if they have any idea that they could be over 4 in 2 years from now or 3 years from now at the same time if you did 15 years they feel more comfortable because it's a shorter you know maturity and it's also probably more marketable so you're saying that debt service isn't like your home where you get to refinance because you don't like the rate you got and there's a lower one so you go

215back into the market and bid again or get bids no the irs frowns on certain things like refinancing stuff you could do certain types of refinancing um but you cannot do it just at any time and we also have a threshold you have to basically have savings of at least two percent if you don't have savings of at least two percent then it's the cost benefit of doing it just doesn't dare we actually had the opportunity we did an analysis we did identify some debt that we had out there and the opportunity to refinance it it is eligible for refinancing and we could have refinanced it but the the savings would have been like 1.4 percent and um and actually that debit had just come out of employer with the irs and i felt safe

216to 1.4 and another risking another irs lawyer that just didn't want to do it so we passed on that okay thank you other questions just one other uh you were saying when we need the next money or the 40 million do we have to spend the 40 million before we can take in so we have to we have to spend basically spend two thirds of it in the next two years and i anticipate that it's based on the fork the cash flow analysis i've seen we should that should not be a problem and because it takes so long to actually do a sale this believe it or not this sale the process for the sale started in december and in december we said let's pick the day in february and have a sale and they

217said okay who's selling at this point they said nobody's selling the week of the february 23rd so no booking and that's when we started the ball rolling so in december we started to pay for work we started the process of doing this and what will happen is as we start to get down you look at the cash flow and how the cash is going out we'll determine how how quickly we're going to run out of money and then we'll start the process knowing that we need a three-month lead to even before the funds will actually put in place so so you know probably actually probably december of this year we'll look again and see where we're at look at the money's coming and planning our next sale and um provided that we if we're at

218half maybe you know even close to half the money being going at that point we're projected to be going within three or four months at that point we'll do a sale good thank you so that is our debt which is page 68 68 make a motion to approve page 68 of the town manager temporarily proof page 68 of the town manager's proposed budget 2022-2023 second promotion a second any further questions all in favor opposed motion pass unanimously so then if you just quickly go back to your front page again and see that we've done the education the town the debt services we did capital improvements um already at the at the february meeting we'll talk about that tomorrow when we do our wrap up and then the last item that we want to talk about

219if you go down is the revenue paid revenue part and as you can see we have uh other property taxes license and permits fines and penalties interest grants service charges other and westwoods ah and our new number is eleven million four hundred and seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty which is an increase of non-tax revenues of one million seven hundred and eight eighty five hundred and seventy three which is eighteen 18.48 percent and if you go to now in the revenue section which is the first uh page it shows that it breaks it out for the first two pages and just i'll give you some highlights is that under state and federal grants um we've talked about this before that we it has been substantially um increased from last year uh the town received an

220additional 1 million six hundred and forty thousand five hundred and thirty three dollars in pilot funds from the state of connecticut um so that's really uh great uh charges and services revenue is expected to increase due to the strong real estate market the town clerk's office has been able to collect a significant amount of revenue from the conveyance tax and recording fees the westwood's golf course is account is a they pay the westwood's golf course contributes to the operating budget and that's 320 000 and that joe just mentioned before under other is the revenue 707 126 is payments to other major users um that's uh that's for the treatment plan so if you go down on each section the license and permits is up 11.15 fines and penalties is a minus 18.9 interest is up

22120 percent the state grants is up 31.3 and that's the state grant that i just mentioned charges and service up 10.8 and that's our what we talked about with the conveyance and if you flip the page over the other the other revenues and then the transfer in is the westwood's contribution and the other assessments are going to be going down because as the interest as the 20-year loan for the other towns every year it gets less and less for the treatment plan so that's why that's decreasing but in general the revenue side of the budget of non-tax revenues is really done quite well i you know again this budget there's a lot of things that have gone right i usually we usually see parts of the budget that have gone right in this budget a

222lot almost everything's gone right and this revenues has gone right too so i don't know if you have any specific questions about the revenue side questions on revenues you like those new cars what was that we like the new cars people keep buying cars so if you wanna it would be a ta joey i would just t8 as the revenues i'd like to make a motion to temporarily approve the revenue side of the town manager's proposed budget for 2022-2023 second we have a motion to second any further discussion seeing none all in favor aye close motion pass unanimously so if you go back to the front page the tax and budget worksheet and we've basically made it through the budget we've made through what we're supposed to do today and what we're basically going to

223do tomorrow uh night um as you can see we have the expenditures at 4.30 percent um which we just discussed um the grand list which we didn't discuss but we can talk about that briefly right now as the grand list is the grand list it's going up 1.72 percent and the majority of that is in the motor vehicles and that's the cars and that's unbelievable at 63 million dollars plus or minus additional to the grand list so that's what's driving this grand list increase which is really helping our budget and then our other non-tax revenues is up 18.48 percent and if you go down to the bottom that shows what uh your tax rate is it's a 29.28 um mill rate with a point four seven percent mill rate change for a one point six

224three percent tax increase for the average residential assessment at 226. so that's where we are right now we've gone through everything and so typically we would probably break now and then reconvene tomorrow but tomorrow would maybe just to maybe review some of the capital again and kind of have a overall discussion about where you would want to be and have some motions and that's it which we could do tonight but i think it would be nice to sleep on all this and we'll come back in tomorrow and and have further discussions on it it's uh the numbers look tremendous again the revenues are fantastic we did what we were expecting to do coming into this budget and we kept everyone's spending where we were looking for it to be we've just gained this extra benefit

225with the bond issues that was tremendous so we've had a lot of things working in our favor for this budget and it looks incredibly attractive so yes i would say we come back tomorrow we discuss a little bit more we can talk about the puppy dog and whatever else we want to discuss on this budget uh yeah and then i i think i unless you guys have some different plan i think that we could probably wrap it up tomorrow do we still get dinner no not if we start at four o'clock i agree that's an incentive to get it done thank you donnie a couple of wrap it up really years on a saturday morning so we didn't have breakfast [Laughter] i've got i've got a pizza place on on speed dial i'll pay i'll

226buy it uber delivers you have to throw out the cardboard oh that's funny though okay well then uh i think we're looking pretty good i will leave you with the quote of the evening uh victory is always possible for the person who refuses to stop and with that do i have a motion to adjourn make a motion to adjourn the march 9 2022 regular town council meeting second we have a motion in a second any discussion all in favor all right we are adjourned at 7 49. you