Select Board working meeting notes

The Select Board had a working session this afternoon. The first item discussed was not on the agenda but Mr. Jim Collins was nominated by Mr. Carney to be the interim Veteran's Agent when our current agent, Shawn Goldstein, takes a new job with the VA. Mr. Collins had previously been the Veteran's Agent and will fill in until a new agent is hired. Mr. Collins has declined taking the position full time. The Select Board approved his appointment unanimously. He will be paid at the current agent's hourly rate for the time being. I spoke with Mr Silvia, who is on the Veteran's Advisory Board, this evening. He said they will take up the matter of a replacement at their next meeting.
Then on to the agenda which was the Fiscal Year 09 (FY09) budget. The Select Board (SB) members at the Finance Committee meeting last Thursday wanted to meet and prioritize the budget before discussing it with the Finance Committee. Here is the method we used to do so. There are 3 sheets to the worksheet we used. The first is for mandated costs and makes up over 80% of the budget. We, the SB, agreed to this nomenclature for the mandate classes. If you would like a copy of the spreadsheet, send me an email to pokanoketlax@hotmail.com and I will email it back to you. I haven't figured out how to post it here yet. If you know how I can do it, tell me on comments or at the email above.

At the FinCom, we agreed to a classification method as follows for these mandates.
Mandate Classes
1- Required by law
2-Required by operational needs of town
3-Override earmark
4-Required by policy decision of SB
As an example, the Bristol Aggie spending is required, so it gets a 1, Accountant overhead is required to operate town departments, so it is assigned a 2, the library override amount is earmarked and gets a 3, and police salaries are mandated by Select Board decision, assign that a 4.

We first reviewed these mandate classes and agreed after a few changes on all.

The second sheet shows the budget broken down by department roughly equivalent to Schedule A that is presented to Town Meeting. The first digit corresponds to the mandate class from the first page. If the category had components of two or more mandate class, the mandate class assigned is the lowest. For example, the town accountant has statutory mandates(1), override mandates (3), and Select Board discretionary spending (4), so it is assigned the lowest mandate class of the three (4) as a first digit.
The second digit is the ranking that you would assign as a priority to that item within it’s mandate class. (1 being the highest and 4 being the lowest) As an example, if the spending is included in an override earmark and you feel it has high priority, it would be assigned a 3 as a first digit (override earmark mandate class) and a 1 for a second digit. The ranking is entered as 31.

The third sheet is miscellaneous items and follows the same methodology as the second page

We were going through that exercise when it became clear that we would have to talk about why we were doing the classification. The override question which passed was presented to the voters as level service funding the town for a single year. Another question would have provided added funds for future years beyond FY09. That question failed. Some felt the voters expected no cuts and others felt that the town would not approve another override for FY10 unless the SB took action to reduce spending this year. After discussion, it was agreed that opportunities to cut spending would be taken despite any representation before the vote. The SB proceeded to set priorities for each item. I will post those here soon.
We also decided that the target for reduction in the budget was 1% of spending or about $680,000. As is often the case when talking about reductions in spending by government(town, state or federal), we are not talking about actual reductions in the dollars spent but reduction in the increases proposed. The "reduction" target is 1% of the 5% increase, actually a 4% increase in dollars spent. This represents about half of the disparity between the rate of growth of expenditures (5%) and the rate of growth of revenue(3%). I think it is a good start.
Some of the departments which may see reductions in their requests are governed by separate boards and committees. We agreed to ask them to meet with the SB in the next couple weeks to discuss how to go about these reductions. Among those who will be asked to meet are the Library Trustees, the DPW board, the Police Chief, and the Council on Ageing.