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[Music] good evening and welcome back to buy line this is a public affairs show here on Amherst Media and it's co-sponsored with the cameras League of Women Voters and back for his second appearance on our show is our member-at-large of the town council and chair of the Finance Committee longtime town public official having been on the Select board and the Finance Committee and done many things over the years Andy Steinberg so welcome back Andy well thank you thank you so much for being willing to come back I guess it wasn't too painful the last time so welcome back and where we're focusing tonight on the budget because we're getting deeper and deeper into the budget process and so I wanted to ask you as chair of the Finance Committee first to just give us a quick thumbnail of where we are in the process and what's going to come next okay well thank you I appreciate being here appreciate being able to inform the viewership about our budget process and the budget going forward at this point the town manager is working on developing a budget that he will propose to the council under the new Charter he's required to make that budget proposal by May 1st and he will do so it will then be immediately referred to the Finance Committee for our review so we do not know the details but I know the broad parameters of what he will be presenting but the specific line item amounts would ureas to in your prior work in the ways with were that waste means committees you don't know what the Ways and Means Committee proposals until I proposed it well we don't know what the time manager is gonna be exactly so he's working with his department heads now to form a budget which will go to the finance could to the town council which will refer it to the Finance Committee how is that different than the process when we had a town meeting it was a different it is largely similar except the deadlines are very different and then the action of the council and the action of Town Meeting are different but this budget process began with the select board giving some priorities and making suggestions we knew we were I was speaking now as a former select board member after switch roles a couple times but the when we were in the Select board we knew we were not going to be seeing the process through to the end but we made recommendations for consideration in future years the council would have that role the manager then looks at the budget as does the superintendent for both of the reiden budgets he works with the regional school budget and the elementary budget which is a part of the town budget and the library director in the prior form of government we would have received the town manager's budget to the Finance Committee in January and then the Finance Committee would have worked on it in February and March for review and decided what to propose to town meeting because town meeting needs needed to get things in April in order to start a town meeting at the very end of April or May but the manager now gives it to the council on May 1st which is a whole extra four months for him to prepare his budget correct and of course because we're no longer bound to the town meeting rules and Town Meeting season we're now operating under a different set of budget rules so we don't really need to have the council act until the very end of the fist just before the beginning of the fiscal year July 1st so the council can wait until June to act which is why the Finance Committee will be doing its work now in May that the prior Finance Committee that was a committee of Town Meeting would have done earlier in the air so you have a couple of months to work on the budget after the town manager gives it to you what do you do during that period we're doing in the council actually we have a much more constrained time for lying than the old Finance Committee had we are required to report back in 30 days in order to give the the council time in Prior Finance Committee would have once a week meetings during a two-month period we're going to have twice a week meetings during a month and we're going to essentially be doing the same sort of thing we will have posted public meetings and I'll give an example on the public safety budget we will have the fire chief and the police chief or with their assistance staff you may come with them to talk about what their budget request is about and sort of give the flesh behind the budget not only this is the amount of money but this is why we've been doing this is what our priorities are and so is that before the Town Council as a whole or before the Finance Committee or before the Finance Committee with all of the town councillors invited if they choose to come option see all right it's not mandatory for the rest of the council correct we are we all of our meetings are public and we have will and have given our schedule to the council that's available and we'll the other councillors be able to participate in asking questions during that those meetings or only observe they can ask me questions and we'll and and where does the public fit into those meetings it's open to the public so the public can be in the audience are they able to ask questions or will there be a public comment period attached to those hearings as there are with the council meetings actually all of our committees have public comment periods because we believe very strongly in allowing public participation and encouraging public participation and so having a public comment element to the meeting will be important and the big difference and I should stress this early I think I even mentioned it last time I was in the show but that's been a while ago yeah is it in Town Meeting Town Meeting could increase or decrease budgets as recommended under the new form of government and under the Charter and we're not unique in this the Town Council has the authority to remove or reduce but does not have the authority to add something new it would have to come back then as a supplemental budget request through the town manager in a different so that run so there's an awful lot more power in the hands of the town manager as compared to the previous budget process under the old government because you can't a little bit there yes and the analogy I'll give by the way is Northampton this is exactly the process except you substitute the word mayor for the two words time and energy but otherwise the process is exactly the same I can think of a couple of instances of examples were town meeting added to budgets in the last few years items that were not preview either by the superintendent or the town manager one was this an amount for social service funding in last year there was a the other example I give for the schools is an amount that would allow for addition of time for library paralegal staff in the budgets one's voted by the Old Town Meeting the question of whether it would be spent by the superintendent of the town manager and those two examples was still and within their discretion those political questions as to whether you want a nor Town Meeting so the big difference in this one is is that if there's a strong feeling that something was left out of a budget the council would really need to come back and ask them for a supplemental budget submission it would not be a part of the annual operating budget so there is a procedure for supplemental budget requests yes and we actually have a head one already that was the station Road bridge okay and that what does that process look like roughly the same as the annual budgeting process where you go to the town manager the town manager comes to the council or can a supplemental budget be initiated by the council itself I not hundred percent sure the answer that little called a lawyer and by the station Road Bridge was a recommendation from the town manager okay and you know if the council resolved to request that the town manager do something and that would be a weight do that that was even though itself would draw strong consideration the Station Road bridge had to go through the whole process as do all of our budgets where we need to have it referred to the Finance Committee the Finance Committee needs to come back with a recommendation there needs to be a hearing a public hearing on it so that there's public invited participation and all of that has to precede the action of the council on the budget and we expect that there as well we know that there will be a hearing that the Finance Committee will have in relation to the major operating budget and the date is at this point been set for May 14th and the only portion that was split off and had a separate hearing has already taken place in April 4th and that was per the regional schools because it was wise to deal with Regional School portion of the budget separately and in sync with our other member in the commune house we're dealing with the town meeting schedule good now you mentioned earlier you don't know the detail of the line items but you know what the parameters are can you address what the nature of the parameters and to whatever extent you can share those in a way that would be useful for the viewers to hear that would be great well I think that it is very simple and it really works out to the stand 80% of the budget is the operating budget and the operating budget is what provides police officers to provide Public Safety firefighters to provide fire safety and providing ambulance service apartment DPW staff to come in and plow roads and take care of roads and fill potholes and you know the bulk of it is personnel their personnel who were working for us now they are providing service and school time the schools the schools are in the elementary schools are part of the regular budget the regional schools are also within the bud a budgeted amount but it's a different process but it's still a monster the same thing we have a town that does things we provide service for people we pride important service for people and the bulk of the budget ultimately is what do we need to continue those services so if that's 80% of the budget what's 20% well is 20% of the split in two fashions part of it is capital and you know we can talk about that for a moment but it's come back me we're looking back to the cap all-big yeah and the other part is there are certain mandated things that we have to do things that prior legislators have told us we have to do or prior contractual commitments pension use kind of give you three real quick yeah pension yeah what's called other post-employment benefits which is we've made promises to retirees to pay their health insurance and we pay their health insurance Regional Transit Authority I give you actually a fourth one charter school tuition uh-huh okay very good so and that's basically that plus the capital is the other 20% yes so let's talk about capital for a few minutes here so last week when our town council president was on we went through the four major projects and we went through the a little bit about the roads and and sidewalks and interested in your perspective as the chair of the Finance Committee about how people in town should be thinking about capital because it's an important part of the budget there are important projects out there but maybe the list is longer than can be done at any given time how do we how do we as a community wrestle with that and how do you as a finance committee chair wrestle with that it is a challenge and I pleased that the council president outlined four major projects which have been something that the prior select board also had identified as prior projects and was working on as part of the difficulty that we're having right now is that because the school project was delayed the cost to build a school was gone up so we're gonna be possibly paying more money to construct a slightly smaller school and it's just a matter and anything down the first leg but we are where we are and so we do have some difficult decisions to make and in order to be able to fund all of these projects or several things that we have to do what is we have to look at how much we can build you know can we build a building that we'd ideally like or do we need to build something a little bit less and I analogize that to somebody's building their house and they're gonna decide what they want to put into their house and how big they want to make their house they make tough decisions and it's a community we're gonna have to make those same kinds of decisions second is when you build something and so the spacing has is a factor in the order in which you are going order and but you do because if you borrow a whole lot of money at once it you run into the ability to make those borrowing commitments if you spread it out over a longer period of time then the paying back of the bonds get spread out over a longer period of time so we have to make those decisions and then the other set of decisions the council will need to make is at what point do we go to the voters furna and ask them to consider a debt exclusion override and that's a fancy term but it's really a amounts to would another communities in the United States I call bond issues it's asking the voters to authorize issuance of bonds to fund a specific building project and understand that their taxes will be increased for the period of time that is necessary to repay those bonds so we are not going to be able to build all of these projects within the existing existing revenue stream because revenue stream has to also pay back debt so we have to decide what it is that we're gonna be asking our voters and then the voters will have to decide and of course we know that there's some matching state funds for schools and library which are two of the projects on the list and but there aren't for the fire station and DPW director improvements that are needed so those those things will no doubt have some influence in the discussion but there is another option here and that is to increase the tax base and you increase the tax base by creating more structures that are then taxed and so in speaking with the town council president when Griesemer in last week's show she said the new community Resources Committee is likely at some point not so long from now to raise the question of creating some kind of a mechanism either a committee or a task force or something that we'll take a look at economic development within the community and that's not necessarily in the jurisdiction of the Finance Committee on the other and the revenue that might be generated by that would be available to the Finance Committee and of course the town manager and the council to be able to afford to do more of the work that we need to do in town absolutely well stated and I actually asked to be considered and was appointed to the Community Resources Committee because I felt that it was important to have an overlap between the two committees because one side the Finance Committee is principally dealing with the expense side of budget the other committee is dealing with the revenue side of the budget but they're both the budget mm-hmm and you can't have one without the other absolutely not now we got a little bit sidetracked when we were talking about the parameters and I just want to make sure that you made all the points you wanted to make about that you said that there was 80 percent of the budget was basically personnel and a bunch of services and then the other 20 percent reflected contractual responsibilities mandates and capital so for example in the state legislature the only major parameter we have as we build the budget is what is the what is our revenue estimate that we're going to use for the next fiscal year which is which is basically a crystal ball exercise because nobody knows 18 months from now how much revenue will have been collected in the twelve months from the end of the fiscal year to the beginning of the going back to the beginning of the fiscal year and you're actually writing the budget six months before that so you're projecting 18 months forward so how do you how do you handle revenue estimates and are there any other parameters that you have to consider or the town manager has to consider when he's building the budget before you get to see all those line items in October of every year for quite a number of years we have had a what we called at that point a four board meeting because it involved the Select board Finance Committee the School Committee in the library trustees and the meeting was with the town manager and the finance director or finance department staff and they would present their recommended budget estimates and then the budget estimates would go through a process they suggested a division of the operating budget side as to how much would should go to schools libraries and to municipal functions and the current year were in sort of this transition so the traditional four board meeting did in fact happen on October of 18 and it was so we we are working off of those estimates as in prior years the staff looks at the actual numbers as they change the taxation we can project pretty clearly the part that is a little bit more difficult for us is the amount from state aid and so we have to periodically test that against first the governor's recommendation and then the House recommendation and ultimately this in the house the recommendation is writers Ways and Means than the House action the same thing happens in the Senate so it's an inter of process but which gets readjusted periodically but I imagined that state had to do the same thing yep except for recessions you can pretty well count on the governor's number being the least and if the house matches that number you know that you're likely to have a number at approximately that and a month later the Senate budget will come out so there was some predictability we even though you didn't get a resolution adopted by the legislature all the time you got some predictability sometimes it was a resolution adopted by the House the governor in the Senate and boom you knew exactly what was going to happen other years they they didn't do a resolution but it as you went through that process it got it got clearer and clearer what the number is going to be only in the recessions do you have the most serious of that of that problem because what if the revenues keep tanking believe me I remember that because I was on the Finance Committee of the old town meeting back in the days and last recessions I lived it and the number kept changing this year which is what we're really ultimately concerned about the projections that were made in October I was so far held to be pretty good through the governor's budget and obviously if the House Ways and Means Committee does something radically different from what the governor's number was that will be a number that is known to the town manager before presenting a budget on May 1st and only the Senate number will not only the Senate number will not be known but that is true that is no different than it would have been a star operating under Town Meeting rules now do you expect the for the all Town Board meeting that you described in October which was the historic historic part of the process do you expect that to continue going forward yes I expect that we will still have the same kind of a budget projection meeting going forward and some discussion that will allow us to give guidance to the superintendent in the library director for the development of their budgets that has the recommendation of the manager and the imprimatur of the council because otherwise you can't get a responsible budget developed for schools and libraries and presented back to the town manager to them incorporate into the town budget so those meetings are here's my wish list and then a response by the town saying you may be being a little bit too ambitious this year it's always a little bit of that possibility but I hit what I found in the old process and I don't expect anything different than this one is that after the October meeting and a decision was made and actually the under the old process it was up to the Finance Committee to make a recommendation because that was a committee of the town meeting and so they would say this is the amount that we think is appropriate for the school budget and then the schools have the wish list but they ultimately understands the need to develop and did follow through developing a budget that fit the number and unfortunately they we're back to the same thing all the way through is that if you decide you want to add something really significantly new it is required to think about what to drop because there isn't enough because there is a line and we've always counted on new growth to get back to your other point if I wasn't kind of on some new growth but it's just enough to still keep us in pace with where we are it doesn't really allow us to add anything substantially new and different and I think that's where the community resources committee discussion really is going to be the most important and since we've run out of time we can't add anything new and substantial to this conversation so I hope you got a better understanding of how our chair of the Finance Committee and his colleagues are going to be working with us to form a budget as we move forward with standing up our new form of government so thank you so much for being here Andy and good luck with your work thank you you're welcome [Music]