001Thank you. Yeah. Good. Okay. Annual town meeting notice is hereby given that of the annual town meeting to be held on Monday 25 school auditorium sect on the Uh, you want to review it? on the voting machines will be submitted to persons qualified to vote in a meeting by referendum that machine shall take place on May Center from 8 a.m. adopted by other business meeting. This was dated the second day of April 2025. It would come down [Music] for Thank you. Uh I'd like to do over ground 2006 holders who own property and analy [Music] about anyone. Please do not conduct dialogue amongst yourselves and address all questions to your moderator. If you wish to speak, please come to the microphone and give your name record microphone there. Um, if you're not also welcome, please
002make that known before you address the meeting. Please note there are no expenditures being voted on tonight. The agenda item for the 5year capital plan is not an expenditure. So, we only vote to approve the plan. In the event we need inspectors, I'll appoint the register register if they need um and we'll move on. The budget is being referred to town item 7.3 no motion. We will simply have a discussion allow and allow the final account to be accepted. After that second year I will open the meeting special two weeks ago. A lot of this will be somewhat familiar, but for those who aren't here, we will review. So this is a review of budget and process and the way it works is the department heads submit initial my office. I meet the finance director.
003We meet with the department heads and have conversations and try to figure out what items can be adjusted so we can get to a budget that would pass. The next step is I make my text and then I propose to the full board of selection again presentations question before the board is selected. We go really good that same process all over again where department has come in the board of asking questions and they get answered. Uh and then that's another round of budget cuts. Finally, uh we will the board of selects forwards the budget to the board of planning and once again they go through the similar process where the department heads come in the board of finance. Board of finance makes further adjustments to get it down to where they think it's accept the
004budget. And then the other thing is there's a capital capital improvement program committee that we did this year. This was the first time that we did capital things committed and we did members of the board of finance for sele. He looked at the equipment and parking rack. I don't know. Again, we needed a new lawn seed or, you know, buy tractor, whatever it is they were, you know, buying for in the budget or in the capital, long-term capital. We got to see it and we could make evaluations whether this was something that really needed to be replaced next year or maybe two years down the road. But we had never done that reporting. What would happen is it would get to the end of the budget process and you know we got we got to
005go through the the capital thing and it often seemed to me that there was a lot of decision took part without enough information. So this year we established capital improvement program committee and it was really a great process. So, um, and I, you know, every year I hopeful that in the future we'll be able to do that every year and really see what the equipment is, what the buildings are like. So with that and the benefit of that information, let's explain what some of the budget initiatives are for the first was to expand the use of fire service. We hope to hire 12 firefighter July 1st, 2025. Then we glean like four fire codes per ship. There's three three ships per day and we have four fire codes in ship. So that would implement the
006the process of scheduling fire. Very important. We have a long range plan. It's not going to happen in the next year, but down the road we'd like to see a total of 18 firefighters. So we could have six firefighters per shift and have two station at each of the fire station. So today coming six firefighters come back 24/7. Another request is the new rescue bill in the capital budget. We really don't have echo folk to go out and rescue somebody. had at least two instances this past year where it was necessary to rescue someone on the water. One was on December 20th. The fellow was a sailboat sinking and he was in distress and we had put a bowl of water with the assistance of the Coast Guard to save the man who's on the
007boat. And then there's another ins there some young ladies that were a party was swimming about two in the morning river across the river. One couple made it to land and the other one was missing. But again they had to put out the sea into the river at least and they did rescue the ship. So there is certainly a need in the coastal town for an adequate rescue vote enhancing services for the community. This past year, you probably read the paper. We created fair rent commission. That's a commission hopes to moderate landlords and tenants and help to moderate with the landlords in charge and and what the independent supreme court and that worked out very well. one particular apartment building where they were able to get together and they were able to maintain the community.
008They didn't have to leave it and they're raising enough so that the investor owner the property could still pay their things. So a very good process and so we created that this year expanding youth family services we need great need for constantly it's elderly people getting advice and so we did expand youth and family services another layer service that we can provide in we increase senior center bus service it's very difficult at a certain age to get back to maybe get to the you CVS or bright aid to pick up your prescriptions. Not everybody has the wherewithal to hire an Uber to hire you someone to go out and give you a ride your doctor's appointment. So are you part of senior center very important service we provide we try increase and then there's several
009nonprofit organizations in town sharers another door is another that we make contributions to. have taxpayers. One of the initiatives is to increase the use of cash capital to reduce debt burden. Now what that means is you know in a town so much different than your own family budget where you go for dinner you need to pay cash or you put it on credit. So to the extent that you can pay cash for things you're reducing your your debt service in the future. And so uh this year uh last year we were able to use and I remember in the 2012 app to pay for the things we have to pay for and we didn't have to borrow this year. We're trying to increase the use of cap to meet the town obligation of 1.3 million.
010That means there 1.3 million we don't bond and we would we'd have to pay off 20 years. Every year we're trying to increase the amount of cash I think conservative increase the amount of cash every year and we're working towards a goal of eventually uh using 2 million in cash capital annually and the savings for the town long term is substantial if we can continue to do that every year. So we're trying to be very fiscally conservative, smart, and don't use the credit card. credit pay for those things that we could pay back. resilience. A few weeks ago, the cyber security scenario where goes to town and cyber security attack, they attack the water and sewer system which control the computer created. Now, municipalities are really soft targets for cyber security threats. We're not part
011of the panic or Maryland. We're not partnered. We're soft target. So, we're trying to do better to do more to be aware and to increase our infrastructure, better software to protect the town and its infrastructure from those types of threats. So, we're trying to increase that. Um, and communications, you know, there's some problems with the radios talking to each other in an emergency situation. Not all the radios communicate as they should. So, how you fix that? The right radio, better towers, better software. So, we've been working on that. We want to improve that infrastructure. Very important. the police, the fire, other departments to be able to communicate in an emergency and we're deficient in that area. We're not where we need to be and we're going to try to get there. There's been 20 years
012to do it, but I've really made it a priority. We got to get that fixed. So, we're working hard communications and then closer resiliency. So on the way to creating a coastal resiliency funum in the case there seaw wall so there's a pool some of those problems so year after year resiliency we're not putting in all think maybe it's 25,000 this year we're putting in but if we can do it every year then we have pool money to gr in that type of an emergency. The other thing is isn't just fixing a law but when we go to Carl coastal communities the ratings looked at if you have a coastal resiliency fund if you're coastal community you're going to pay more for the money you so we want to be sure that we have that
013fund in place now we've taken steps and if everything goes plan to the board of election. It's going back to the board of finance came back to the board of selection to create the ordinance to create the fund we expect all the timing that we got right in place before the end of the school year. So by the end of June we'll have new that creates the coast of resiliency that'll help us in the [Music] future. Okay. So what are some of the drivers and why is the budget what it is? Why can't it just stay the same every year? Why is it going to go up? They're increasing. One is increased health insurance 9% this year. increased electrically. Everybody has seen it on your electric bill. There's a section in orange, I think, on
014the red side. It's the public benefit. Um, pays that, too. And it's hundreds of thousands of dollars that we have to pay every year that our our bill public benefit. So, it's not you when you pay your bill, it's the families that pay as well. increase venture contribution. Currently it's 700,000 contribute every year. We're expecting next year 1 million but we have to contribute into the pension fund. So the time the people retire that money will be there. It'll be in pension account so they won't have to worry pay their pension. All right. Um he signs very very good shape in that regard much better than many municipalities. So our pension board they meet regularly meetings little talk about the numbers the investments but it's very sophisticated. They do a wonderful job. They've left very
015hard people to set on the pension board and uh they really keep track of of of that fund and this year they keep pace of the bill. So we have to contribute more this year. Software costs you just like in computer you have Microsoft and Apple operating system. We have many many different types of software. ADP which is the payroll which is the body cams for the police. It's very expensive. They store it up on the cloud and in order to get access to it, we have to make sure we're up to date with maxing them other software. We already talked about hiring additional career firefighter and of course pressures continue the plague. We have a district play the operating that was collaboration we did create efficiencies and we really try to do that public
016works about we are maybe we can share resources so we're we're to do that. not always easy to stick to different priorities and different but let's look at the overview that's kind of the the big criteria but if we look at the fiscal year 202 the adopted budget that's the one on the far left 2025 we adopted for the town operations 317 debt service we're just poverty we have to pay a debt and we try to do things to reduce that every year of 6,754,250 the cash capital to 750. So then we red reduce reduced debt service by 750 and we're going to try to keep doing. So the sub total was 30,586 319 was 60 million 24675. So the total budget for 2025 is a 90 million 5929. So now the next are this
017year's budget started through every number but the bottom department heads they requested 998 with amenities first selection they went down 989 then went to court of selection they re they actually 98 million res 250 52. That's because there were so many cuts that I made that they thought um there were certain services and things that required and so they added back in. And finally uh the board of another look at it and it ended up being 96,657 which is a 6.69% increase. So that's what we said tonight. that's being presented to you and you'll hear this quickly and he'll present his portion then so the podium Thank you again. Let me first start by just thanking uh boards the board of education chairman chair board of education members as well as boardman board finance for
018all the work and effort that we put into the budget process uh year after year it's a lot of work start to finish as we know and that's a busy moon so we'll leave up to wrap up next year for our districts uh I want to also just thank Our team members admin team especially finance director and sustenance early work as well. We build our from the ground up starts very early in the spring here. Just a second. Couple of accolades. Most of this we share just a couple slides to share every week of sharing couple of accolades from this year. We have many of them across our school district extremely have community and peer mentor grow programs branch out work community work with citizens working with our students. We have accomplished some program that
019started here driven by staff when she went out and raised the money to to make that. We have um PCC and state team champions. We have students athletes that go and become state champions. We have a high school band national champions US. So some some great things happen. The biggest ones are this high school ranked 10th in the state. So to be ranked two from the state very high school brief I won't read them all but there's a lot of great things and a lot of effort to reach out to our community team but that being said also shared services our first talk first let me talk talked about shared services just a minute ago we do do many shared services you know with with the town sharing utilities sharing the mail carrier save uh
020save we share with other districts as well we've got partnerships going in with Waterford partnerships with Gold Line where those students are coming to us for the EMT course here at the high school. We're planning on sending some students to Waterford High School next year to take notice. So that's a a good shared service model. We're branching out to tap into extra resources for our students and adults to the region. We also share our food service director, our facilities director, and our security director. They all oversee s public schools. They provide those services and s pays us a fee. So there's another s being used to all school districts where they benefit from our expertise in covering those areas and we also share of course uh course learning with region schools collaboration sharing students between
021schools. So just one other quick our nursing supervisor we just put a nursing supervisor in place this year. So a lot of cost efficiency, a lot of a lot of cost measures that we always look at year after year trying to save board of education money process for us this year as I said it's fairly lengthy. It starts uh back in the very beginning of the year September. We're already reaching out to the schools. We build from the bottom everybody's budgeting. We ask our schools to put together their budgets. That starts with new teachers and staffing classrooms. They bring forth their needs to the principles. The principles put their budget together at the school and they send it to CO office. We put them all together and go through that information and bring it to
022our first workshop where we accept a preliminary budget for the next year that started to 8.26% that budget workshop really December we have a month later we have another workshop where we're able to do the great work of Mrs. Stevens comb through every line item find duplicates of things that maybe the school put in the sector office put in those then like proposed budget was a 64 million21,400 6% increase that for education board of education brought down 6.72% for an increase it then to the board of finance uh board of finance initially made a reduction to that increase uh and that brought the potential 432. After the public hearing, they reinstated some dollars and they brought it back up to 5.34%. An increase I believe is 63 million 2324. Just to lay that out a
023little further to finance in the end reduction of the increase of 675 and you can see that 64%. Lastly, uh I just want to mention fixed costs coming in talked about inflation, talked about contracts, very similar to 97 or 98% many school districts operating budget is is fixed costs. We have um contracts with staff, teachers, administrators, par professionals, custodians, secretaries. Those are all a treasury good. They usually have a three-year contract associated with negotiate those. Also, you have transportation contracts. You have electricity contracts. All of those contractual obligations fit into that large red there. The little sliver here on our supplies textbook software in equipment 3.2 is really what we have and it's a very small sliver traction. That's all I have to share. Thank you very much uh for being here tonight. We'll turn
024it back over to uh Mrs. Paul, our general first. Thank you for coming here tonight. appreciate it. People probably so I appreciate everyone here and just want to put in just say thank you That's the first That's the paper. Yeah. I think you put the wrong one. No. Oh, they've got it down there. Or at least it was downloaded down there. If I downloaded the wrong one, my apology. Yeah, let me try to find it again. the screen up there for I've I've got the email from Kevin. So, I'm I'm downloading it now. I thought that's the one that I downloaded earlier. Correct. Sorry. Um so generally speaking the April presentation there was only one change or one item that has changed since the presentation that was up here previously for Mr. Cunningham silver. They
025are they were from April. The one I'm going to show you now is the one that is the result of the meeting that took place after the public hearing where the adjustment was made to the board of education. So these are all numbers for everything. Thanks for just a little bit. So basically what you're seeing here is the overall increase in the expenditures from last year number 169,000 decrease increase from what department asked for an 87,000 decrease from public works was looking for general government benefits was a decrease of 271,000 and to be decreased contingency by 67 but even all of those cuts to public safety public works and things that we're doing every day in town. There is still an increase of from that previous year went through what a lot of the drivers
026of those increases. the board of education operations. As as Jeff pointed out, after the public hearing, there were quite a few numbers of parents that spoke in opposition to the decrease of board of finance. So the restoration then resulted in a total of 825,000 reduction the budget that they would have been asked for with 150,000 of that a adjustment to their initial insurance number that they had in their both the town and for betting is the same state insurance program. The board of ed adopts their budget before the state of Connecticut releases what the increase in insurance is going to be. But by the time the town adopts their budget, they have gotten the updated number from the town. So 150,000 then 825 total 825,000 total reduction in the board of debt was just an
027adjustment in the insurance our debt service number there's not we can do that it's basically taking our standing what is it going to take for us to service that debt in one year so there's there's really know maybe that and then cash capital this kind of explain is our attempt to do more cash like Sam is every year in your capital improvement plan we set aside money for roads roads is a continuous thing always working on it's a lot of miles of roads the state and so public works as a continuous program updating them. So one of the things we would like to do is be able to pay for that for the cash. So the extent of everything that capital insurance but the more the tax increase over. So we also dropped that from
028the initial request from the federal revenues as you can see the biggest number is taxes paid by our residents. Connecticut has 30 towns in training towns in Connecticut. Very few sources of revenue. So the other is our interdomal revenue. So that be save federal grants which is paying taxes the things that went through this year actually wrote a letter to the editor to the Connecticut exam and the perfect part was we have what we call payment in lie of taxes in those that state grant that's supposed to make us whole from the fact that they got stateowned property in our town. And when the state owns the property, they don't pay us taxes in the same way that if that property was in residence that they would be okay. So we have your brushless center
029rock state park in town if the state fully funded what successor do those and could have generated taxes by residents than for businesses then getting over 3 million instead you get less than a million grand We get town aid the roads grants into a number of different things and all of that flows into the intergovernmental revenues. We have investment earnings anyone pays their taxes twice a year. The town's bank account grows. We're aiming to invest those in certain instruments CDs, repurchase agreements, federal bills, things like that or let's say medicate short-term investment. So those funds come due very quickly to payroll and do that. So the town's bank account basically goes up. January, July slowly gets spent down but we're able to reinvest those funds shortterm and that creates that investments. So we have charges
030for services for different things. It's building inspectors go out this weekend homes that are sold they rebates all those different things our sources are perfect. So overall you know the expenses and the revenues have to balance I would say so the whole budget it's ending up at 6.67% 67. So how does that impact your mill rate? So what we do is get a total of the grand mass. So the value of all the properties, determine what the value of one would be. We then determine maybe a best guess on the flushing. of you know the people pay their taxes. So we've had a very you know healthy experience of people paying their taxes on and we actually could above our collection rate but we've been doing a little bit better than 98.2 that we last
031year. So we've up that to 99% everything that we can collect and reduced the delinquency rate. So all of that results in our tax levy of 78,600,26 which would result in a null rate of 28.01 zero which is a 6.3% increase over this linear point of so the next question then is well what impact does that have in dollars I mean and last year when we were doing this we had a number of people who said you know what about commercial properties your our graph here when we went to like 1 million or two million something like that. So we added on tried to make it a little bit clearer for people here. So the first column is the actual value and then the next is the assessed value which is what their taxes are
032based on. So in our previous year the bill rate was 26.3 cents. Then if this budget passes it would go to 28.0. So the the lowest of a $50,000 property would have monthly increase of $5 if you went to median home value on these lines is approximately 387 million. So somewhere between the 300 is going to be 400,000 property value and you'll see that the monthly increase is going to be somewhere between 34 and $38. So you can kind of look to see where you fall and see what the so on projects. So these are for the current year. So although we will be showing you the slides here and will include summary the the thing we're looking at right here it's just the current year. So these are the projects that the capital improvement
033program committee voted to go forward with in this fiscal year. So um under general government some of the things that were adopted were for the assessor will be going into evaluation next year. So there's the home success next year. We also have money for a senior set of bus. There was a grant that was available. So we finished that grant. We have a very age furniture throughout our town go buildings. So we have different projects planned to do some refurbishing there and there's some 25,000 for the Brookside Museum to do some more in public safety. We got 755,000 in there for the radio an hour. This is a it's very important. We have had areas where the public safety has not been able to communicate with people since where police officers responded to the altercation
034with the beaches and they couldn't get through with any radio assistance. So it really is something that we we have to invest in our entire radio infrastructure of alternative hardware and equipment that goes with it. safety also there's about 376,000 for different vehicles and the equipment that go on the vehicles fire 250,000. So those are some of the main things of public safety, public works, 999,000 for roads, another 360,000 for vehicles or equipment that they use and storage that that will be employed at that. So use between then maintenance and equipment. So storage youth and family services over the community. So this is the fiveyear capital improvement program and for the most yes of the will That concludes your presentation. 403 package 84 home street I am here as the chairman of the commission on
035aging and I would like to put a little perspective behalf of not not only our board but on the senior population at the time. Um we're not we're not here opposed to budget. We're just here to to get some data that we've already given at various meetings, but we just want to bring this to your attention. Again, of our population that's 55 and older, 37% of the population reaches that that portion of population. 32% of population is 60%. you look at that from a comparative the state of Connecticut. So apart from typical older receive just a couple other things we'd like to bring to your attention talk about percent of the budget certainly board of education is very very important to all of us but we just like to put things in perspective from our
036budget the total budget for the senior is less less than 2/3 of 1% sorry less than one/ird of 1% of the entire budget any typical if you take the board of education and you just take your total budget divided by the number of school days um we do not even reach total budget for our senior center does not even come up come close to one day's cost to board of educ education. So again, we're just here to put things in perspective for we're not against the budget. We just want to bring those items out there and I thank you for the option of bringing this to your attention. Thank you. Would anyone else like to open the vote? Seeing none, we will move to items for two of the agenda. I would like to a
037resolution to adopt the 5year capital plan. We have a second open up to continue. So generally speaking in the five years we created capital years ahead see what we think we may be able to fit in and or you know what given it's done. So this past year, the community center, the senior center, the library and the youth services, they have explored the idea of um creating bigger and better and better use of space and community center. And with that they were hoping that that would go in this current year budget. But after meeting with them and some meeting with the state legislators, they think that there's an opportunity to get state funding now. So if you see in 2028, it's actually in public works budget as it's building. So that goes into the C
038because we want to make sure that when the state looks at this that they know that we're serious that this would be that would support if it wasn't in the CIP then they would be listening to help it for us. So that's doesn't mean that this is a sure thing with going to borrow that 20.7 million in 2028. But we have to have a number in there some reasonableness so that when the state looks at it look on it. But you know, every year we look and see Mr. very very thorough way to look at every single piece of equipment and then going out each year saying what is the expected life of every every piece of equipment figuring out when it's going to have to replace it. So that's the type of thing that
039you then would see in his CI is exactly what we place here in the same thing goes to the the board as well. So I think the other thing here is in public safety for the fire service and facilities got two7 years to the rebuild and restore those things. Um, other than that, most of the items that you can see are fairly going forward. But again, the only thing that is sure in our budget is the current expenditures. Everything going forward is our best guess. We will need to be the other thing I just want to point out, we've been very diligent about a lot of information website. If you haven't been to the website, I really encourage you to go. It's the ball.com and the hit on government on board finance. We have all
040the budget documents. There's links the videos from our meetings to the meeting here and we have information saveful information that I find fascinating and everybody else I just think that transparency is free. If you have any questions, email us too. nothing really hasn't already been covered but again I just want to give the guys a couple of um you know to look at the infrastructure board and really do the like to really see what we have what we need and and projecting it to 2030 for the I believe that would anyone like to hear the question. All those in favor of adopting the 5-year capital improvement plan, please signify by saying oppose. Motion carries. This being the last item of the agenda, I'll entertain a motion to adjourn the meeting to a referendum by machine
041to take place on May 22nd, 2013 at the Eastland Community Center from 8:00 a.m. 8:00 p.m. Is there a motion to second? We have a second. All in favor? We are D to UFO.