001welcome will call us meeting to order at about 603 this is a finance meeting and we've got three three topics on the agenda tonight one is the update on the tyler financial package which encompasses the accounting systems as well as the hr systems inclusive of payroll etc the next item would be the budgets that we proposed and what we're going to do or what's in the process in order to compensate for what the city gave us and then a third item uh was the last item that was ended and it would be to discuss the exempt employees i guess these are salaries so let's take it in the first order uh let's go back to the the the tyler the tyler update uh on the implementation of the the system to to go back not
002looking to repeat history but i think many of us on a committee here just want to make sure that the occurrences which brought up a lot of the public comment and criticisms and awareness as of today that can you tell us that the the i'm gonna refer to the issue of the glitch as i call it uh has been has been corrected number one is the question number two has any and all issues that have attributed to to that been resolved and if not are they in a process of being resolved and thirdly which i think is an important one which i don't have any clarity on what is the general feeling and i use that word loosely um based i don't want to say the industry based on the the members or your staff
003passed to a progress in terms of responding to them etc so that's been handled thus far and do they have any further concerns that are outstanding those are sort of historical stuff just to say give us a brief update and then we can go through and i would hope courtney's here which i see she is if we can share i ask you to find out this work chart as it's called i think it's very impressive to show how much work is involved in the the the need for professionalism and guidance in here is to what's involved to do it uh and everybody would have an understanding as to the workload that's involved in these implementations of new systems so to that i'll i'll throw it up to courtney if you can just respond to some
004of the initial questions i have and just make it brief or yes or no and i think such as satisfy most of the committee members and we can just x off those items and just move on sure i just put together based on what you asked just a brief brief powerpoint just to kind of say what's happened to date and what our next steps are so just very briefly the it had to be set up and configured and that means that we had to set up all the deductions and benefits there's 79 unique types of deductions believe it or not or not for our employees that includes their retirement trb their city pension their health insurance their life insurance their direct deposit net pay if they have a credit union every aspect of their pay
005their 79 unique types we also set up all types of positions and supplementals there's 3074 unique um types not including the part-time and sub-staff we imported all active employee maintenance records that's 2406 active records and also many archived records for historical purposes and we imported all their position information we had to create work calendars there's three 33 unique work calendars believe it or not rich cathy are now there are 29 unique salary schedules and we created a single pay cycle which is the advisable standard we had to link each position to a work calendar a salary schedule and a pay calendar it's a tremendous amount of setup and a tremendous amount of collaboration between the groups to get this set up and running properly it's no longer a siloed hr payroll system it's a single
006you know single system for the purpose of hr and payroll so all of that setup occurred our testing we ran our first payroll on january 13th of 21 2021 we ran a parallel payroll to compare it to the december 16th payroll in our legacy system which is the standard of practice we compared line by line 18 349 rows of data um to assess the variances and explain the differences from pay to pay we this control enabled us to correct errors so for example a few employees that were recently on fmla right before i go live that were not inactivated or for example an administrator that was included in the trb group with an assumption that she was an 0.92 but she was not she had a fico correction there were a few things that happened
007in those first few days because of the volume of records and quite frankly the short length of time that we had for implementation um now we regularly we run a payroll to payroll report which looks at every single record by employee name and every single deduction so for example an employee a single employee could have up to 18 records for example on average that's about how many they have if they have many positions and if they have many different types of deductions we run a variance from payroll for example the last one we ran was 24 so we look at the posted payroll payroll 23 we compare it to payroll 24 and then we we sort by all the variances and we go through as a team and explain every single one of them we
008will not have to do this forever we just have to do this while we're comfortable that the controls are in place so for example we see that somebody's page dropped off we look it up and we say oh yes that was a terminated employee we see that somebody's health insurance changed we say oh yes that employee changed to family coverage we go through point by point by point to explain all of those variances and it's really time consuming but it's something that you have to do when you go live in the payroll um the hsa issue that occurred was on february 8th this is the infamous you know glitch that rich talked about um that was a particular payroll we had a lot of a lot a lot a lot large volume of pay changes
009normally we run a payroll on a friday before a wednesday settlement date that gives you plenty of time with the bank if there's any challenges with the bank that's the length of time that the bank usually recommends that you settle ahead of your payroll in this particular payroll payroll because we had worked through the weekend and we had so many changes we were running it on a monday somehow because we hadn't set up the proper controls which we have now put in place through gina being the main person that's um you know assigning the rights to each of the different access points of the system we had multiple players that were in the deduction screen and what happened was the the particular hsa deduction it's called an employer contribution employers get um we have an
010employer contribution for different groups in the contract it says they some people get it quarterly we do it by annually we should revisit that and others get it once a year um and for the once a year group someone went in and accidentally checked off every box in that calendar so that when it ran through payroll people that were supposed to get it in september got a employer sponsored hsa deduction on that particular pay in a normal world when we have plenty of time to do our payroll we would have noticed that immediately through all the checks and balances i said we had in place on that particular day we noticed it about 10 minutes after we submitted the ach which is an electronic file transmission we immediately contacted nina khan a treasurer at the
011bank we spoke with her and she assisted us to get the proper items in place to do a full reversal of that ach transaction and that meant that's another file you send you send a request and they do a reversal file and then you submit your corrected payroll file that corrected payroll file was submitted without those hsa contributions so i'll give you an example i myself and courtney am a recipient of a three thousand dollar hsa contribution in september and that erroneous payroll that ran on february 8th it came through as a three thousand dollar pay to my hsa we reversed it before the settlement date which was february 10th so what appeared on my statement was it looked like it was a contribution and a withdrawal that's an error it shouldn't have been a
012contribution and a withdrawal it should be a contribution and an adjusted an adjustment to withdrawal that employee never withdrew their money we reached out to sigma immediately and right away we had assurance full assurance in writing in an email that that hsa correction could be changed in the coding to an adjusted correction which meant that that deduction would not appear as a as a contribution and a withdrawal it would just appear as a net zero and have no tax implications we had that in writing from them from day one it took us about two months to get the corrected file and the correct people at cigna to work with us to get that corrected coding okay we have 100 reassurance that all of those people that ran through on that hsa have been corrected how
013do i know this i found the right person her name is jen berry at cigna she got the file extraction directly from hsa bank which is what we asked for all along because that's the corrected that's the correct file had 100 of the transactions on it and she was able to issue corrected coding to have it as a reverse uh adjusted it's called a adjusted distribution so when any employee looks up into their account they can see that there's been zero contributions for this year i checked against that bank file and i can see that 100 of those corrections have been made we also have quarterly reports that we run with cigna just to verify when someone's getting close to the max of their contribution because the federal government sets tax limits for the contribution
014for a given year for families and singles they alert us they can't tell us who they can alert the employee directly because employees are allowed to make their own individual contributions into their hsas it's their own bank account but we do have a protocol in place because we've had this happen before many times in the past where the district used to make overages and contributions to employees hsa on behalf of like the employer-sponsored portion and we've in the past submitted these suggestive corrections through when it used to be with chase bank we had about 10 a year that happened not to the i think this point you know i'm satisfied is to to what happens and don't have to go into further details for the the the the participants that were involved they've been contacted
015uh and and explained what had happened and whatever the results i have been made to restitution with them or with you if there's money due etc uh and that's been corrected how is the the feedback of this information to the other members in in that are concerned basically the the union representatives who are they on on on target or have they been or are you keeping them abreast as to the progress that you're doing and what you're making and is there any conversations back back and forth as to any further the concerns that they have so they can be addressed as we're implementing this system yeah so dr cell issued a letter um directly related to this issue with assurances um in addition i have a meeting scheduled it was for today but um aaron
016had to reschedule for tomorrow with the teachers union i'm meeting with the secretaries group um on monday about a separate issue but i'm going to certainly circle back with them about this in addition i sent an email last night about how to check your paycheck um and as a result i got just a few responses with people just asking about clarification for how to access their check and things like that and then dr sell sent an additional communication today and as a result you know i've gotten a lot of questions but the questions are all not errors they're easily answered questions like our old system used to round the pay so for example if you were making uh one thousand two hundred dollars in our old system it would catch you up on the plus
017or minus on the last pay but our current system rounds to the p is to the penny so instead of making 1070 you're making 1069.90 i'm getting a lot of questions on that so i'm just explaining yeah it's rounding but check your salary your salary is still the same in addition i'm getting questions about the two paychecks so our old system was a manual calculation for people that have a teaching position they're required to participate in the teachers retirement board pension for employees that are working another job that's not pensionable like for example if they're working with our early learn program we take fica we're not a section it's called a section 208 district where we get exempt from the fica for the supplemental pays we do we are required by law to take that
018fica from for the employee on behalf of employees for retirement and so those run in the new system as two separate paychecks we're exploring the option to combine them but it caused a lot of errors so right now they're getting correct pay but they're just getting two paychecks for those that are running a second job i would assume on the pardon me i would assume in that situation when you got the fighter it's kind of tricky because the fico would be calculated on on the total as opposed to partitioning it between salary a and salary b so correct it's actually it's actually something that the consultants have to work through richard it's not quite that um simple there were issues about setup whether or not you know defaults to go to fico were checked or
019unchecked and and these this is one of the big areas the fico and trb that we're working closely with the consultants on um i just this is sort of a i wasn't anticipating a powerpoint but i i there have been still some issues and you know one of your questions was are you convinced that it's resolved and part of my job wearing the legal hat is you know we were asked to write a home hold harmless for all of our unions and i don't quite know what the scope is honestly um to hold harmless you know i'm trying to hedge with the unions to really restrict this to this february 10th hsa issue but one of the questions that i did have for cigna was are you confident that we have reversed everything that it's
020all been reversed and their response was we've reversed the ones we were told about so i'm i'm not sure i'm real comfortable saying i think that we've handled it all i just don't know i don't think we know what we don't know just a minute please please there is data to show that that i've asked you to review courtney [Music] this is where we're having issues obviously i just discussed with the consultant one of their activities richard based on last week is that they're going to meet with courtney and with kim to double check all discrepancies and get to the bottom of it okay so that we can have the assurance courtney identified the people we know and there may be others so the job is now is for them to sit down and say
021yes that was it or it's a little further and i think as of tomorrow they have a plan for that okay and they can't respond to that though because so let me respond to that please so we were talking specifically about that february issuance right in addition it the eight the representative from hsa that's a very junior person sent us a file saying that these additional contributions were questionable from the payroll side she did that in error they were actually voluntary contributions from the individuals that were sent outside of the district directly to um hsa bank we can explore that with the with the um designated uh you know um with the consultants um there was what there was an additional issue with the hsa outside of this payroll when too many people had access
022to that deduction where four people got that pro-rated i've since turned that off i am not allowing us to do courtney hold on courtney hold on i don't need to shut you hold on don't mean to shut you off i think sal explained at this point here that you know what's being resolved you don't have to go through all the details i'm not looking to to rehash what happened i'm just looking to get an update and i think the you've answered the question i haven't answered i have a question for kim in layman's terms so i don't have a bad side what does hold harmless mean so it can mean a lot of different things honestly dick but in this context what we're looking for is that look the good news about all of this
023is that i don't think that the dollar exposure is large because everything seems to be reversed at least all those ones on that february 10th were reversed but the concern is just if there are ramifications down the road let's say for example i'm not saying it's going to happen but let's say the w-2 ends up being wrong or there are tax consequences or we missed one and you blew across the cap for for depositing into your hsa account there may be tax ramifications for that and what the union is asked is would you hold us harmless hold your employees harmless not only if there are financial penalties but what if they get audited what if they need to have an accountant and so part of what i see my job as being is narrowing down
024the risk of exposure on those things and and that's the nature of the hold harmless i'm trying very hard to do that by letter with these groups they're looking for a formalized agreement and i think you know i'm trying very hard to to kind of work with them because the message obviously for us is if it was our error or anything stemming from this obviously that flows we're going to help you fix um but that's why um i think you know in in working particularly with shipment and goodwin and talking about the scope of a hold harmless what we're trying to do is is make sure that we've got some idea of what we think that's going to look like and like i said the good news is that the reversal happened it didn't happen
025the right way at first but it did happen so that the dollar exposure is really just on those few people that were able to spend the money that went into the account you know they kind of had a hole and run yeah sure um but but i think this residual exposure is the other one um and i just i you know it's a massive transition there's a lot of data and i just i always get nervous with the um with the global statements that we've got everything i just that makes me nervous well let me let me go back and just ask the would i be naive to think that this general whole homeless would be that you know there's never you know we're going to attest to the fact that there's never going to
026be a mistake and if there's a mistake you know we're going to no rich that's why we're trying to that's right i understand it to pin it down because it would be almost impossible to make a statement i'm zeroed around that february 10th date honestly you wrote around those yeah and we had past practice rich and kim and dr phil i'm sure you're aware of this where if we did this which we have done many times in the past going back years we there was a form that the employees submitted saying that they agreed to reduce the next hsa contribution which happened with these four individuals they all agreed in writing and said that you know yes we we access and they're very kind about it and they said yes you know offset our september
027deduction by this amount and it's past practice we've always done that okay and richard i have a question richard yeah go ahead uh for courtney kim and whoever uh in the project the project private progress all right we show uh under under payroll need to go through all the rules and responsibilities of payroll running we'll be setting up and maintaining deductions also some others confirmation and validation and payroll accuracy uh and confirm all deductions are working accurately need to validate uh the tax setup we have target dates of of may 25th and what may 21st have no targets been met already i can share with you some of the targets let's see so on the general ledger side you're asking specifically about the under the section of payroll because that's that's the portion we're working
028on at the moment right yeah let me find depsel is it okay for me to share the work plan or um well i i i i don't have the work plan but i was i was cut out of answering those questions i think those timelines al just asking yeah that's all i think we have haven't we yeah no we haven't met that yet um that's we're on target to meet it but um and um it hasn't been directed to the committee on thursday morning every thursday morning which is tomorrow morning we take this and update it so we um so that we don't miss anything so that that's my assurances with the consultants that we're doing this um so tomorrow morning i'll have a better idea as everybody upstates their uh information yeah rich can
029i ask a question please all right go ahead okay um i i have i have two questions really i hope that's okay um my first question is courtney can you give me an idea of the number of people who were working on the first phase of this project with you it was pretty small um yeah it was me um and my my finance staff and some limited involvement with the human resource group um so from october to late december it was a really small group and then we also had the tyler consultants working with us we probably met with them a total of in the course of those three months um i want to say probably about 15 to 20 days full days of sessions and then so those are 15 to 20 days of
030training you actually way more than that i'm just saying with the group it was 15 to 20 days it's training and then you go back and do testing and then you do building and then you come back to them and do testing so um it was more than that i i it was let's see probably about six you know 30 days of training and then i worked in you know independently with some contractors like over the two weeks of holidays um christmas new year's yeah so yeah yeah and how many how many people are in this are being paid through this system being paid through the system well we have 3 000 different types of pay for the full positions and supplementals in addition we have many many many substitutes and part-timers as well so
031on a given payroll i would say the volume of pay is um from paycheck standpoint um probably six or seven thousand so we're talking about a data conversion from one system to the other that involves six thousand individual records that potentially all have hundreds hundreds and hundreds of thousands of individual records actually hundreds of thousands because it's every aspect of a person that we track um so it's their name their their spouse their address their type of pay their their calendar the frequency of pay um their position it's it's hundreds of thousands of lines of data okay and we have we have a new person that's come in to sort of oversee the the rest of the process and because i know we're we have to work into you know other aspects of the system
032right um do we have additional folks that we've hired for some of this data work um and i guess the other piece of that is you know obviously this is all very supposed to be very secure information so um you know what what measures are in place to make sure that whoever we're bringing in to work on this is um capable of doing that work yeah that's a good question so dr sal reached out to a firm that identified people to assist us and i think we'd all say that they're doing a really good job and we're satisfied and i'd defer to kim and dr sal and and kelly's online too but i'll say from my experience um we have a consultant her name is lindsay and thierry she was referred to us by um
033like i asked for a project manager back in um september of last year and she was referred to us by the software implementer at that time and so we were able to reach out to her recently and kim actually knows the firm that she was working with so she as well as her boss are engaged to help us through the project management piece in addition we now have the full support with gina working on the project as well as kim dr sal and the executive committee and i have a consultant working with me as a bookkeeper that's helping with the data because we still have some data conversion on the general ledger side that we're going through that's pretty significant um and involved and we're getting there well i expect that we'll be fully loaded
034and fully ready to go with the general ledger by end of week next week um i just i apologize i just want to go back to something you mentioned though because you you mentioned that you made contact with this person back in september yeah and was what was the reason behind not bringing this person on board at that point in the process i think it was just but budgetary constraints i i i dr said is that the case um i i you know what i'm not sure what she's talking about really yeah we uh we signed a contract with tyler and you know it was a few hundred thousand dollars we transferred over uh and i'm assuming everything was going well until we had these problems when we did um you know we talked about
035bringing on consultants and to help us so i kate i couldn't tell you about why someone else wasn't brought on or not i don't know she may have asked but right oh my god okay i guess and i don't mean look i don't mean to cause i'm not trying to cause uh i just want to i want to get an understanding of the situation because if what courtney's saying is true i mean i've i can't speak to a payroll situation but i have done a data implementation both on the like bringing a system in and developing it and then also a conversion from an old system to a new system so i do have some background in that and i know what goes into it even when you're talking about a much smaller amount of
036data and my concern is that internally we did not have the structure in place to support that process and i don't want to see it happen again right because we have this next portion of the process that we're going through and i appreciate that we're bringing additional people on now to you know work with us and to make sure that that that conversion happens properly but you can understand from my perspective i'm sure that there's some concern about how you know the reassurances right now are not don't feel very reassuring to me can i just i just want to respond for a minute because there's a couple of things kate that you said that are super important um the security one is is really important um rit director did not get responsibility on the security
037for this until about 10 days ago and so rit director who ordinarily handles security for everything in the district power school everywhere was not a part of this internal workings of this conversion until about 10 days ago yeah there was also um and i've never and i'm going to be the first to say i i was surprised at what goes into this conversion because it was my assumption when we you might remember last spring we were jettisoning a project that was a product that we thought we were going to use and we moved into tyler at the last minute and switched my impression of that was that we were getting a much more turnkey solution than we got and so um this process really required us to build everything from the ground up and and
038they're very quick to say we tell you all the bells and whistles and you guys figure out what you want and i was startled in the many sessions that i attended that it really was a here's how you do it you guys go off and do it yourself when you're talking about you know courtney's got two payroll people and i've got three really three people in my department it was staggering um but there was a project manager from tyler who was supposed to be shepherding the project through with courtney we i think we had two i'm not sure if we had two but i know yeah they won um and she has been helping to shepherd um my approach with my team was um i have a couple of people who do different things and
039i tapped one to be the captain for our team and she attended i think it was over 70 sessions since the summer so since the spring so melissa bang from my office often was on those sessions doing something else with her screen on but there to answer questions to to provide input so i i and and on many occasions my team was brought in at the last minute to do a calendar to do to answer a question so they were pretty involved all the way along but i think none of us were really aware um until we got to january that um you know we had to migrate large amounts of data and we have people that do that every day you know we have people that handle all of our student data and those
040people were not involved in the data migration so i think we're all kind of trying to figure out now kind of where we are and that's why the the consultant particularly the project manager from bloom should people not call bloom shapiro anymore but that's why they're so critical because um they're coming in to sort of sort through where we've been and try to figure out but but it seems to me that when we imported some data rather than just taking the same data we changed a lot of it and and i don't know why but that's what we're trying to sort back out now so i'm not really comfortable answering a lot of your questions right now because i don't feel like we know enough uh yeah with every thursday we're getting more information and
041i hear what you're saying kim i mean i i can only speak from my own experience with this right but this is a pretty common problem and this is something that a lot of folks who go through these kind of conversions come into which is that your data doesn't necessarily translate directly it's not like you're taking it out of one field in the system and putting in the same field in the other system we're drilling into the weeds i think a little dude there is a there's a flow chart that is being built that has been built on what has to be accomplished first with target dates i believe my opinion yes there wasn't enough personnel involved in the beginning but that's been rectified the project manager brought in some experts and the data that
042i've seen from last week's meeting is this is being structured correctly with target dates that build one on top of the other and if those those targets are met we can move forward and the fact that additional personnel has been brought in and additional expertise um i think we should just move forward with that and and i'm i'm waiting for uh tomorrow's data to see if the dates have been met some of the the payroll was due for what may 25th which is may 21st which is a few days off um so i guess i would like to well yeah let's be the be the fly on the wall and see where that if those those uh those points have been accomplished and those target dates met but yeah now we just need to move
043forward oh we know what the problem was it's being fixed and and but i believe a lot of it was personnel and um and his law and we have we have the expertise outside expertise now to uh to make it fly to to move us forward yeah and i would like ladies excuse me kim and courtney am i correct in my statement yeah i think you'll see when we do the deep dive of the data i'm sure you're going to see that it's we're paying people correctly like i have every confidence in that and i'm glad that no courtney if we're not running a side by side how do we know kathy that's right that's that's what the people are doing with us uh getting i actually do run the side by side every payroll
044so if i finish my statement for it yeah thank you i think the question was to meet dr cell like courtney i don't know i don't i no i don't katherine this is where we're running into that's why i'm bringing these folks in her team has been running that yes and we are doing a verification one of the persons that we've brought in has done what kate is talking about in her district and she's really been explicit with advice and she's identifying um new reports that we didn't know existed that maybe they could work on to do some double checking tomorrow um there's a does jeff and lindsay and kim and courtney we're going to talk about payroll and then they're going to talk about this verification system and then they're going to go double
045check exactly what courtney's talking about only a little deeper to get to some of the things that maybe kim is talking about no that's where i was trying to go with that all right so i'd just like to know what are the things because okay quote in conclusion because his al said you know this is not the form to get into into the details and and none of us on on the board are really have a hands-on to to to to to really discuss it we're just here trying to obtain certain information but but i do understand project flow because i haven't i'm not saying that let me finish please so um this is cameron mr chairman could we sort of do this orderly please one person speak at this time thank you yeah so
046in conclusion i was going to say that as i look at it the issues happening prior kim is working on to to resolve all right whatever happened before 2020 hindsight perhaps we should have had the project manager on board to start but the fact that they're on board now is helping us implement the system and to go through all of these checks and balances with regard to additional personnel it's my understanding that the additional personnel has been authorized it's perhaps just a matter of getting it and the workflow chart that it uh the the workflow chart that was prepared is very detailed by function it had purchasing it had payables on it human release hr payroll etc etc so i'm comfortable that each of those are going to be looked out with the anticipated target
047dates so i sort of you know have been answered given answers to the questions i have i'm not looking to again bring up before i get into a debate i just want to just move forward to know that we're moving forward in a logical orderly fashion with professional help i think everybody agrees that this is a monumental task that maybe we didn't understand before but at the point we've got a target date here i believe of july 1st to get everything working in a good order so it takes a lot of teamwork with that being said you know if anybody has any more questions that that's fine we're not looking to blame anyone richard all we're looking for is assurances going forward that we are working to correct it that we will not have another
048public flogging from the union at our board meetings that we that they will be uh in the loop knowing that we know about it that we are fixing it that we have hired additional personnel and and move on i'm not looking to blame anyone i just want the assurance that what is our monetary um exposure you know yeah okay i think kim is working on that into all your points i think as we evolve through this process those assurances to the best way i could phrase is with the controls that are implemented and the controls both on the system end and on the processing end of the review and you know that's about all we can do humans are humans glitches or i get it that's it so i i think we'll have the assurances
049at the end of the project that we've asked for today you know once this thing is completed and everybody has all the yeah and that are that our employees know that we are our we have their backs that's all yeah thank you yeah and i think um you know courtney is talking to the union heads and kim is and um you know we send out the letters uh we we told them look mia culpa we may have made some hiccups this is a monumental thing and we're we have these experts in now that are scanning and you can expect some things to you know summer emerge again and we'll handle them correctly and identify them and communicate with folks we gave them those promises and that's what we're working on thank you mr chairman yeah
050um can i make a request that you know we get some more regular updates of this situation um maybe a weekly update um you know i understand you know you guys have to you know participate in this process and oversee it and you've got folks that you're working with but i think it would help a lot of us board members feel more comfortable about the progress being made if we could see that progress on a weekly basis and know exactly you know what is being done and what is what is still outstanding you know kate i i think weekly maybe a little too too quick maybe you know but by week weekly bi-weekly is fine because that there's a lot in there and if they move a date from may 21st to may 25th and
051next week there's not much to discuss with just looking for projects yeah that's fine i just i think some regular updates yeah and certainly we could figure out a form and how that's done i do want to make a comment to dr sal that both al and i appreciated your inviting us to be part of this this consulting group you know we the we enjoyed being there on behalf of the board it shows us in a professionalism that that has involved the information that we're being provided and the structure by which these people are are really holding us the cast to do things and resolve i was very impressed with sometimes there's a debate as what to do or how to do it and there's an umpire there this the fellow who's in charge his
052first name is jeff i'm not sure his last name but in any way he he calls his shots along with you so it's the proper way to do things and and i just want to say we thank you for for that and we'd like to continue to to be part of that project as sort of flies on a wall just to see and and also to to assure not a sure i hate to use that word but to get back to to other board members that we have a comfort level that things are moving along quickly rich i think that was my next question are we on the call tomorrow morning i wasn't doing that because it's an operational meeting i didn't think i brought you guys in last week because the depth of the
053problem i'd like to take that work plan and update you guys together because we do get into personnel and a lot of other things i think it's an operation meeting and i don't think you want to start going into that mix and match that's just my opinion okay how are you agreeing yeah yeah but but i thought last week al because the problem was so grand those i think you needed to see with me with everybody you know what it was like and then put this together and then feel confident we have the right people and then try to get to you kate rich and everybody and let you know on a regular basis how we're doing with it thank you i i do appreciate that sir no i'm not an accountant and i don't
054comment on account but the project flow i am well you know been exposed to several times in the past and it just i think it may might give the board a better comfort level if we're there as long as we don't interfere and and i would appreciate an invite if it was okay to do yeah i would second that sal because under normal situations i'd say you're 100 right i don't want to be involved in your business that's what we pay you and your staff for but only because of of this particular issue it's again it's another learning curve for us and it gives us the ability to then get back and and advise the other board members as to what we're seeing from from our subs perspectives you know we're not evaluating or we
055don't care how you guys interact with each other to come up with a solution that that's your particular you know way of of of resolving issues but um i i would like to to be extended the invitation to continue not to be nosy but just on a information basis because it's an educational process to me since i've done several of these i was very impressed with your consulting team the response that they give to your staff when they ask the questions and i think for us to have these comments and going back to the board is certainly very helpful to the information we're not looking here to be critical or part of any of the conversation because we're not in involved in how your operation works it's totally different than perhaps uh to a certain
056extent a business industry is something that all the the gimmicks you have and things you got to do and i just want to add to that rich if that's okay yeah i think there's an additional component here for us here as board members in that you know an employee from the district came before us and said you know i'm having this problem and i've escalated this appropriately up the chain of command and i haven't gotten a resolution and now i'm coming to you with this problem so our role in this particular situation i think is a little different than it normally would be because of how how this is unfolded you know and and you know i just you know to be able to watch what's happening and to see what's happening and have have
057that ability to to um oversee is not the right word you know right it's just to be able to be you know included in that process right i think i think that's that at this point you know becomes has become our responsibility because this has come up that aboard me yeah you know and and that puts us in a difficult position right we have to we have to honor our our responsibility to the district especially when it comes to a budget item yeah yeah yeah okay so it's a very big deal yeah so you know with that being said style i i asked for you to make an exception we're not saying to make this policy i know you only got 15 or 16 days you know left but you know in this particular state
058it it would be appreciative if we can continue to be fly in a wall and and um just as an asset and add to [Music] the comfort level that we're on the right track so i'll let you think about it if we get the invitation tomorrow that's fine if we don't you'll get a phone call okay so could we for the yellow board members can committee members can we move on uh i just uh before we move on just everyone uh it's been really tough on on everybody i understand it really does and you know it's it's just it's very very sensitive and there are a lot of issues at hand um but you need to know that um you know the course of action is the correct course of action and uh we'll do
059everything we can to keep you updated you have my word on that okay i don't i don't look good in orange it's a new shade of black katherine it's not no it's not like it's not in my it's not in my wheelhouse yeah so what does that mean does that mean we're not invited tomorrow morning to sell or we are i i want to think about it okay all right that's fine as i said let us know in the morning you know what i said before about the opening of schools when we spend all that money to reopen schools and we give it it's kind of hard to take it back something you gave but all right with that being said let's move on to the second item if i'm there again i'll ask the
060other committee members are there any other issues on this this subject any other questions or rich could i just make one comment um it's that i think when you see like i welcome you to come and see the system if you're if you're not going to come to the executive sessions and see the reporting that we get out of it it's really exciting it's a very robust accounting and reporting system and also integrates human resource and finance in a way that we've never had it's going to allow us to do multi-fund reporting and a lot of the things we've been looking to do for multi-year reporting as well so in spite of you know the negative spin here i think once we have the consultant certify the validity of the data and the work that's
061been done to date and the folks on our team get comfortable with that as well as the board i think you're gonna see it's an awesome system and it's going to really bring us like many light years forward in terms of i'm sure it is you know a lot of people say that yeah it's a lot of hard work it'll pay off yeah it will so to item number two on the agenda the budget okay switching tasks generally the first question is is this update us on what the status is two questions what the status is of the the the the the governor's freeze of the alliance money to us is you know basically what's the status and number two what is the the gap that we have um that that we're working with because
062during the the conversations we had the the city session things were still up on the air whether it would be four million dollars whether it be 1.8 million dollars etc so i'd like to know what that final gap number is and then are you in a position to to go through and present to us what your rationale is to to come down to a final budget number yeah um i'm sorry let me just close this i have a courtney uh we worked on this she has the information okay um we um we just we're getting into information from the feds you know on the dollars we do have to provide those assurances one of the things that believe it or not that put us in a position for one of those assurances is that we
063have a reopening plan with all students coming back uh so that was a big thing for them uh for the money anyway so we we just got that yesterday assurances but as far as dollar and cents courtney you want to kind of go through the thumbnail what we've decided oh sure yeah sure doctor's out um so to start with your question about the alliance freeze we got assurance from ryan and this was a conversation dr sal had so i saw your email dr sal that it would be likely not frozen and 2.5 yeah thank you courtney he uh yeah you're right he uh he he said uh there there's support on both sides of the island with the governor and that he's 99 sure that at least at 5 million dollars over two years uh
064will be coming to danbury and you know that money's always been passed through to us yeah right yeah and that's part of the overall just reminder i think people know this ecs grant so the ecs grant has the formula that allows us to get an adjusted amount that every year it increases we were expecting 2.7 so i have to dive into the details of why it's 2.5 um we're happy to be getting the funding but i do want to understand why it's reduced from our original expectation um so then in your thinking of the presentation of the budget then then you're taking into account to reduce that four million dollar gap is we left it to at least half of that at this point yeah we did this might be in the weeds and you
065tell me rich if it's two in the weeds but this is our planning document that we've been working for we pretty it up to present it to the board but this is sort of how we do make the sausage and since it's the finance committee we thought we'd share it with you like this um and i'll just walk you through it briefly because this alliance money assumes that we're going to get 17.3 next year which is including the new 2.5 so we've done sort of an all funds planning document here and i'll just briefly say you know the city money the alliance money and what we can't call as gladys said here esser one two and three so we could remember it that way and it has a series of assumptions here in the total
066this is the funding at the top this is the base expenses here and i'll explain that in a minute and these are all the new things that we were asking for in our budget and how cabinet at this point in time is proposing or has worked through how we would afford what we want to do what we're hoping to do so yep at the end of the day just going down through through totals if you are finished with so what did you come up with i guess my question is did you zero out did you we asked for 13 million are we using all funding to to to accomplish the 13 million yeah there were some minor modifications to our original ask but for the most part yes like we're right now we asked for
06713 million which was um partially i'm sorry you're not seeing one of my [Music] i don't know am i in an older document i apologize give me one second rich so it was you'll remember the 3.7 which was the carry you see the here i'm so sorry okay um yeah here 7.1 was our carryforward ask and then in addition we have about 13 million dollars of new requests this document is a is a blend of all of our city of original asks and what we look to do with sr um two and three so basically we're saying that our carry forward ask would be funded with 3.2 million of the city dollars because we were already counting on this 1.2 for the enrollment growth and then two million dollars of alliance so that's shifts of
068things that we um were doing in our in our one-time grants into alliance of two million dollars and then another shift into s or three from some of our baseline money for the six million dollars that we needed i'm sorry for the seven seven million dollars we needed just for the carry forward [Music] addition we were looking to do these additional things so if anybody in cabinet would like to interject i'm just going to present the numbers but we called this brookfield enrollment and distancing and this is um you know for high school teachers high school overloads the brookfield that we talked about the teachers that are needed for staffing at the brookfield campus some support staff like nurses and safety advocates and custodial staff and the teachers that we would need to and the
069special ed support staff in addition so how we are proposing to afford this is we put a portion of it into our grant application that we submitted for sr2 and we would propose at least at this point in time that we put another 2.3 into s or 3. so i'll just go back yeah just let me bear with you so it appears to me that this is your it's not is this your what you look to present to us are you going to adjust this further so this is where we are now with our latest set of meetings about the budget um so this is basically saying that all all told all things being equal we would have to use you know all of these different funding sources so a rollover of care is about
070770k six million of s or two and eight million of s or three to afford the things that we were looking to do so for example in our initial class yup hold on before we go before we go further i guess my next question is i always find this extremely important and not only that but it's terribly complicated however in the interest of the rest of the board members my position would be my feeling is that we hold off now that you finish this we hold off this presentation to the finance committee because it would just mean a regurgitation of this you know going through this you know for in-depth time and then to present it to the board we're wasting a lot of time repeating it so would mrs cooper agree and dr sal
071do you think would be worth it to stop here and make this presentation available to a board workshop so we have all 11 members of the board participate in the answering questions on this and not just the four members that that you have here i you know i think it would be certainly more informative to everybody else you know rather than go through this thing twice and have to regurgitate the information twice yeah it's a boy's prerogative rich however you want to handle it i know we're all you know you've got a lot of meetings coming up i know but this is important and i think the comprehension of it is the next meeting yeah if you want it's up to it's okay with me yeah mrs cooper what do you think what about the
072other committee members well i think the uh workshop would be appropriate but you know we have to fit the slot in for a workshop i'm sorry i didn't hear your last report you got to find a time to do it i think we'll have to find the time to do it okay all right and then what about the other committee members what are your feelings i think it would be helpful to have a workshop okay mr russo i was quiet on this one catherine's on here too just in the middle of the catherine okay it's fine if we have a workshop um okay great catherine al it's katherine and i i'd rather have a workshop also okay and i haven't heard from al but he's muted i've had some outside interference so i had to
073mute myself what was the last question sir i'm asking to postpone this presentation to the finance committee tonight to do it to the full board of the workshop so that everybody's privy to the information and could ask their questions as they seem fit i have no issues with a workshop i don't like to reiterate my interest in being there tomorrow morning at eight o'clock okay that's a different issue however all right then we'll work out a timetable we'll fit it in because i i find this terribly important very complex and we're going to need a lot of time and i'd like everybody's input on it particularly since we're going to have a change over next year and some of our board members so i think those that are on the board next year that are
074here would have this and will be able to have the continuity as to what's happening rather than just a snapshot of it i think that transitional educational process is very important as we go forward it's going to be more and more difficult to keep track of all this stuff um so let's let's put this off and we'll come up with a date as soon as possible and uh mr genelec while we have everybody on could we look at a possible date or june the second june oh i'm sorry i'm busy on the second it's a wednesday right and we're free to vote no board meeting but then again my opinion don't matter anyway we have a policy meeting that evening at 6. you want to do it at 7 can you you al you said
075you couldn't be there no i'm afraid i'm engaged on on on second what about the third gladys on uh enrich on black thursday june 3rd i'm not available on the third i'm sorry okay okay i'm available wednesday night uh maybe i can make it later or thursday night thursday night would be good thursday the third would be good maybe to have a little early at six that that's fine is thursday june third okay it is so it's settled so we'll have that at six o'clock on june 3rd and what i can do then rich if you like is get materials to people in advance i know people some people like to have something in hand i think that would be an excellent idea because scrolling down quickly on this stuff it's really yeah and it
076also allows people time to see where your crossouts are and i so i think that's a a good idea but i think one of rich things you're trying to get at what of the 13 million we afforded and didn't afford i'm gonna separate this out into two buckets the first bucket will be what our original ask was in the total and then the bottom bucket will be what our new things are related to esther you know two and three and then also rich i and the rest of um sounded from um our lobbyist um ryan that the governor we might actually know by that day what what's been approved because there's still some hanging sheds i call it with some money in um that could come our way so we may also by that day
077know what the governor has signed okay and so i've got to be very open and i'll explain this to to everybody on on the meet as well as corpy i am very concerned ultimately down the road but i think one of the greatest things we did and it was certainly an educational benefit to when we presented it was that multi-year budget because i think it helped the general public it helped the the the council understand where we are i'm concerned about the additional funding that we're going to be adding to our operational budget in the years to come you know not only taking this into account forecasting that in in the years ahead but interpreting a budgetary scenario for the reopening of the schools that we're using federal funds for as well as the the
078funding of the academy you know i think we've got to look at these numbers um and and see what these aggregate numbers are going to be so that we can then you or somebody in your position to then sit down with the city and say look based on a border bed strategic plan we've got a multi-year forecast that says that we're going to be asking for 20 million 25 million dollars etc based on these particular projects that we're doing um to me it makes sense to to share this information have a working relationship with the other part of the city government there so they could at least work to to see what their revenues are to support this you know we go year and year and we keep coming up with you know requests we
079throw stuff against the wall we make it work and you know we're always robbing peter the paypal but in this particular case you know we're going to be up the creek with with the paddle without a paddle because of the size of this cliff that we're building and so that's my concern for the future of us and that's all i'm going to say so for the board's edification here um i think you're right um when i listened to the committee meeting that night the 1110 vote ten of the people got it even the others got it and i think you you know courtney's idea and yours we laid it out pretty plain the question i ask myself is you know if i not if i don't use this money for kids to save the town
080from a cliff what do i use it for yeah and i'm and i don't think it's right and i know you're not saying that none of us we'll do what's right for our kids but you know and the other so we've made that point the other thing that you guys are going to be facing we don't know who's going to be sitting in that chair next year right that's an issue for you to communicate with leadership and we will do that but i think from listening to everybody they got it between the eyes saying look in three years guys in fact here's one answer i got well in two years you might get more money just push it down the road further that was an answer that we did get you may recall but i
081think the message was given and after the board approves this we'll we'll do it again and then i think after the election which is going to be a little late because that's november already um we'll have to have another powwow you know i agree all right you know i agree 100 we do what's right for the kids but you know ultimately everybody has to understand what the ultimate cost is and where the funding is coming from so that when we get to that point in time we're not faced with the limit to say okay we got to backtrack or whatever the other these solutions that a problem are so we've just got to change in the future the the way we operate to be more connected with each other you know we got two big
082changes this year we got superintendent we got a new mayor so you know the things that are going to be done differently than they have in the past only because of human nature but okay so we solve that problem let's go on to the uh other issue solve that problem [Music] before we move on i just want to ask courtney a quick question courtney will you be able to have that presentation and document ready by may the 28th so board members can get it and be able to uh go through it because that's memorial day weekend yes i'll be able to gladys i'll get it in advance of that okay if i can commit if i'm okay i can commit to getting through yeah let me look at my calendar right now um can get
083it out to folks by the 26th if that's okay with silent cabinet um okay yeah whichever date that works good for you just so important members can have it ahead of time of course guys thank you sal for clarity purpose solving that problem was the only reference to agenda item on two which was the budget subject that was all and and settling a date on a workshop okay moving ahead to the next item uh which is the the salary part for example yeah i i just want to lay it on i think we need to think it through um i think the um the um exempt staff i have in the budget um an increase for them of about three percent um i think what the board needs to think about and i think you're
084looking at it now when you're looking at my salary going forward in comparison with other superintendents i think you're going to be in a dilemma with the distances with salaries of my central staff um this is gonna be a bigger issue for you going down the road uh but i do think that um if you're when you're thinking the bringing on a new person and i'm not gonna go down that that's your business not mine but when you look at the comparison and you pick a number we've always tried to do um you know some relative distancing but with but reasonably between positions and i think that that's going to grow and um i think it's not fair for my folks who are with us working hard not to realize a decent increase going forward
085for next year one um two i i do think that um position wise um we need to look at that uh we are growing exponentially number wise i think kate just brought something up and you did in terms of do you have enough staff well the answer is no we keep putting them in classrooms and you know as courtney says we need this and we've tried to make things work i think we need to somehow um look at you guys need to look at with my team some kind of a reorganization to to really help out and get things done uh with that said um you know i i i'd like to think this through or maybe an executive session come to you guys and talk about what i'm thinking relative to raises for our
086people because i think the minimum in there three percent um um is not going to bring them to where it needs it needs to be and that's something um i don't say lightly to you i think you have people you want to keep and i think to be fair to them relative to what you think you might be doing with a new person sitting in my seat to do them justice we should look at that and i just don't want to leave without alerting you uh to potential challenges and problems could it be would it be plausible or wise to defer this as well until we have the meeting on june 3rd and then possibly if we have an executive session after that to discuss this so it's wrapped up basically hopefully in one evening
087and we can take yeah that would be okay with me i i do want to you know the sooner the better for them but i do think we need to give them justice to think it through sure but nothing please give you an idea of what i think we're facing nothing takes effect until july 1st is that correct right so it's just a decision-making factor prior to july 1st just remember richard you've got about i think about 60 people on that exempt list so you've got this this core team that dr cell's talking about but you've also got lots of central office secretaries and those people so even on you know on june 3rd usually you deal with them kind of as a group and you look at the most comparable group but just remember
088you've got all of those people for july 1 as well 60 60 people is the non-exempt yeah i i think i haven't added it up recently but it also includes like your ots and pt's and so there's it's quite a big list thank and and the you i said to to take it at the time of the budget but there may be some people who think you know if we're talking about a budget and it's too high why am i giving raises so at this point here we covered all in the same evening and we hash out all of the pros and cons so um and normally as i said we used to do this i think it was a little bit earlier but we'll see but if that's okay then we'll include in the
089agenda mrs cooper then possibly an executive not possibly but a good idea to have an executive session after the workshop to discuss this in detail okay that'd work rich you know and in fact this time i think i will invite kim in uh she can do a presentation um you know and kevin they're going to be there this way you can hear directly from them and one final question stupid question do we do a superintendent's evaluation this year no no just give me a cake and say goodbye [Music] okay does any any other absolute humor this uh any other committee members have any any questions i'm good i'm good you need a you need a motion to adjourn that's fine i think i'm awesome okay i'll second it thank you all right guys thank you
090you