Rockport Budget Committee Tables Budget Goal, Presses for EMS Regional Talks

[0:00] Speaker A (unidentified): Two different things to ask. How can we reduce services to reduce the budget and to say how can we reduce the budget and maintain some acceptable level of service? Maybe the answer is both, but that's where you need to know how the town feels again. The survey hopefully will tell us something, but I think Bill's right that everybody wants everything. It's a hard thing, but I think we should be looking for ways we can and deliver the services people want and expect in the cheapest possible way. I'm not personally convinced we're doing that today. I'm not also convinced that the solutions are always easy, but I think that's our job, to try and figure out what the options are. And like Bill said, 3% cost of living, the town budget is almost 60% personnel. That's a 1.5% increase right out of the gate if you do nothing else. And then you've got step increases on top of that, which are also mandated. So that's probably another few percentage points. So you're talking about probably at least $300,000 of new spending in this coming year? Right, exactly, before anything else. And things are getting expensive. So I'm personally not at all interested in frittering away at the edges, like you said. I'd like to find six-figure savings. But we need to talk about it. And I think as the person who asked AI to produce this agenda and kind of got it out of the order, we probably should talk about major budget cost drivers and alternatives before we talk about a budget goal and growth target, but looking at it now, I don't know. [1:40] Speaker B (unidentified): I'd just like to add something. Again, I haven't been here very long in these meetings, but I really haven't heard much discussion about increasing revenue, and I'm wondering it you know is that just because well you know the town is generating as much revenue as is reasonably possible or are there other options of some you know is there any kind of opening there to bring more money into the budget in addition to reducing spending [2:21] Speaker C (unidentified): to come up with additional ways to gather it. The big challenge, I think, is the state has cut back on so much money that they've given to support the towns that the revenue becomes more and more critical. I think each one of the departments is being challenged at this point, as I understand it, to see if there aren't some areas where they can increase their revenue. [2:42] Speaker D (unidentified): I think Megan is working on that. With my understanding from the meetings that I've been to, she's working on that. It's gonna come back with some sort of report on revenue possibilities, and they're working with the town leaders on that. [2:56] Speaker C (unidentified): John, do you know where the select board is at this point on the regionalization task force? Well, [3:07] Mike Boyle: we've gotten a couple applications Craig Mitchell applied we got Terry Moore I think is his name who has a background with the EMS so he 's applied I've heard there's one more person that I am not familiar with from lives out on Park Street and I think he's applied so they're trickling in to become members of the task force but one of the challenge challenges with the task force is what are they gonna look at you know I mean we've got I think it would be helpful for this group maybe to give them a focus of, you know, give them a recommendation of what you think, where you think they should focus. Because I think that's going to be a challenge. You're gonna have people of different talents in there, and they're, they're just opting in as citizens. They're not necessarily, they don't have financial backgrounds as far as I can tell so far. You know, I'm hoping, I know we got Craig from the Budget Committee on it, but you know, I think we could use a little more muscle there. Not that I'm looking at Walker or anything like that but you know I think there would be there 'd be opportunities there but there's also meanwhile there's a lot of activity going on towards regionalization it's well it's public it is public record I guess because we received an invitation from the select board of Camden to meet with them later this month. We're working on a date. We don't have a firm date yet, so some things are starting to move. I think all the towns in the area, Camden's meeting with Lincolnville, I think, and some other two towns started meeting. So it seems like it's in the water right now, that the towns are kind of either on their own or as a group. So I'm confident that there's going to be a lot more activity here. I don't have any specifics yet for you, Bill, other than I think there's some great opportunities with Camden that are emerging now. Where will we start to do regionalization, or where will we, what will be the first piece of that? Again, I'd be jumping the gun on the conversations because we haven't really had all of us in the room yet. [5:50] Speaker C (unidentified): TODD BANDUCCI- Would it be fair to say there's not a sense of real urgency from the select board? [5:55] Mike Boyle: MIKE BOYLE.: No, there is a sense of urgency. [5:56] Speaker C (unidentified): TODD BANDUCCI- Because you just don't hear anything, John. [5:57] Mike Boyle: MIKE BOYLE.: Well, it's in the goals for the coming year for the select board. And I was advocating. I'll just speak for myself. I don't know if any of you guys heard the conversation around goals for the select board, but I'm a big believer and in a date certain on goals, you know, like if we're gonna set that goal, what are we gonna accomplish by when, and even if it's just a token amount, I mean, I think I proposed something like, I think it was, remembering, I'm going on memory now, I think I put out there, look, just $20,000 that we can say we're gonna find to save between now and June 1st, and you know, that was, that was a challenge for people to get their arms around that twenty thousand dollars. Well, I think, I think what, but we did end up with a goal for regionalization. It's not to my personal satisfaction in terms of how I would phrase in word goals, but I think it's a, it's a good start. Yeah, so I think, I think there's definitely the message is clearly getting through, you guys. I mean, I think, I think that's pretty certain. You know, there's some other things that are afoot. You know, we've got some other initiatives that are going on that, you know, a housing plan is in the works and that sort of thing. So I need to do that, John, the last [7:26] Speaker D (unidentified): time I get reminded how we get off on the few things. Let's do the housing [7:32] Mike Boyle: thing later. That's fine. I'm just saying that there are no aspects to regionalization that are more than just say in the MS department. And I agree, I agree, I just, I just [7:41] Speaker D (unidentified): think that from what some of the committee members have talked about, we get off too far and nothing gets accomplished. No argument there. So he's not even on the committee. Yeah, so no, and that's good, but he's our guy, he's our guy. I'm just responding to a question. No, I know, so John, [8:00] Speaker C (unidentified): Who is it that should be deciding which areas we should look at regionalization? [8:05] Mike Boyle: Who should it be? Well, I think that's, to me, you've heard me say this before. I think you guys can make recommendations, and you've got a collective group here, and you guys are looking at things in more detail than the average person. So I think there's an opportunity here for you guys to inform that conversation. [8:28] Speaker C (unidentified): I think it's easy to identify them. TODD BANDUCCI- All right. TODD BANDUCCI- You go right down the line, EMS, police, fire, sewer, and right there, you've got four of them. [8:39] Mike Boyle: TODD BANDUCCI- Well, sewer doesn't affect the budget. [8:43] Speaker C (unidentified): TODD BANDUCCI- It affects the taxpayers in this town. TODD BANDUCCI- No. [8:45] Mike Boyle: TODD BANDUCCI- It doesn't? TODD BANDUCCI- No. It only affects the sewer users. [8:48] Speaker C (unidentified): TODD BANDUCCI- OK, that's what I meant when I said taxpayers. [8:51] Mike Boyle: TODD BANDUCCI- But that's only 700 out of all the taxpayers in town. So, OK. So we got EMS, police. [9:02] Speaker C (unidentified): I'm just trying to figure out what we're supposed to do as a committee. [9:06] Mike Boyle: Well, I can share with you what was in the invitation we received from the town of Camden, which just came in a few days ago, by the way, so it's... [9:16] Speaker D (unidentified): While you're bringing that up, Taylor, you got something you wanted to throw in there, and then I'll get right back with you, Steve. You'll be next. [9:21] Mike Boyle: I'm going to get the topics that were on the... [9:22] Speaker D (unidentified): I just have a question. Does the Broad Court budget committee? No. I don't believe so, but... It's a good point. [9:40] Speaker C (unidentified): But the select board makes the votes. I mean, they're the people that decide. Yeah. [9:45] Speaker D (unidentified): So, thank you, Taylor. Go ahead, Steve. [9:48] Speaker F (unidentified): Well, just, I've got a bunch that I'm trying to work my way through. [9:51] Speaker D (unidentified): I'm going to pull you in quick, though. Just on back to respect to Steve. [9:55] Speaker F (unidentified): No, I wanted to respond to Steve, because I appreciate what he said, but I want to, so a couple of things. One, I want to reinforce how valuable the work was that you did. And I'm with you. I would have, I would have, I would have, I would have, I would have, I would have I would have gone much harder into where these spendings, I mean, I've, I've, you know, I've done this, I've done charts, I've done grids, I've done graphs, like, so, but I, think it's fair to say that collectively, the group had a pretty big impact into what John was saying, the message was sent, and, you know, we had a flat budget, which is, I thought was a miracle at the time that it happened, I was, I don't know that I was expecting much more than that, I would have voted for the, I actually would have voted for that budget if there wasn't a last-minute staffing change that the select board decided they had to have. And up until then, I think we actually did a couple of things. We put the brakes on sort of the increase, and we also made some sort of investments in some things. So I think the challenge of sitting here and trying to figure out what can be regionalized, what can't be regionalized, is we're not in these discussions. I appreciate Lincolnville taking the lead here. They are the ones that have started to reach out. I'm glad that Camden has also taken the lead. I would love for Rockport to pick the phone and call somebody else and take the lead themselves at some point. That would be great. But I do think we're making some headway here, and we did put a little money in the budget this last time to support regionalization initiatives by the town staff. So there was a chunk. Because when we had a couple of members of the staff in here, we started talking about, yes, the big money is in EMS, the big money is in public safety, but can the town clerks get together and figure out how to share data systems and IT contracts? Can other teams of town staff work with their colleagues in other towns and begin to build a culture where this is done routinely? keenly. And I think that what we're pushing back against is a culture. I mean, John put it in his, John Duke put it in one of his budget letters about how important it was for us to be self-sufficient. Like that somehow became a goal that we have to do it all ourselves. And certainly what has happened in the last five years would suggest that 's been the driving philosophy of the town. But I'm glad to hear that has, that has changed. But I, so I would encourage you to stay with it, but i do think you know i think we have an opportunity to look at ems. there were studies that were done in the run-up to the decision about ems that looked at regional alternatives. i sent them one of those studies out to you guys the other day. some we there are people in the community who were part of those studies who might be helpful to bring in and talk to. so i think there's work that we can do here that will be productive, and if nothing else we're putting some solutions and some ideas on the table that hopefully John and his team take into consideration as they present this budget, and when he shows up here in March with the budget we'll know whether he listened to us or not and what he thinks he's hearing in terms of what they want. but I think you know I think we can get some good work done in the next couple of months highlighting some of these pieces. but you know the challenges were not in these meetings. I don't know what the discussions were with Camden around police and why when we had the opportunity to have a hired police chief, a shared police chief, both towns turned it down. Now we're looking for a police chief. We had good partnerships with the sheriff. That all went out the window, so now we're not working with the sheriff. But we're not part of those discussions. That's what makes the regionalization thing hard. And so you count on, I'm counting on either the staff doing it, which is what we talked about last time, and incentivizing them to do that, or I'm, I can't tell you I want to go and like hang a medal around the necks of the Lincolnville select board because they actually are taking the kind of leadership that I had hoped this town would take to reach out to the surrounding towns and say, let's sit down and figure out how to do this, but we're, we're, to your point, tell it's hard for us as a budget committee to reach out to other, you know, I mean, let's, we're sort of stuck on that. We really need town leadership and we don't have it, so we're, we're in a little bit of a bind, but I do think we can dig into where these numbers came from, for sure. John, [14:17] Speaker D (unidentified): any thoughts before we, I mean, because you had something you wanted to go with? Well, I just wanted to the [14:27] Mike Boyle: town of Camden's letter and highlighted four bullet points that they would suggest as an opportunity to begin discussions on regionalization, not that these are, and they're, they're open to others, they're, this is just sort of the opening invitation. First one is, of course, wastewater. And then the second one, not necessarily ranked, by the way, public works, assessing, and police. So, you know. Assessing, you said? Assessing, which we already do share, by the way. [Speaker C (unidentified): Nothing on EMAS.] They specifically wanted to not talk about that. So, now, try not to read too much into that. Try not to read too much into all of this. So there's more than just a letter, Steve. I want to assure you there's many conversations going on one-on-one that some of this has got a little more nuance to it than a public meeting and that sort of thing. So I've had multiple conversations with a number of the select board members in the other towns, leadership in the other towns, just my own activity. So I'm trying not to take what you said personally. I appreciate that. But I think it's a little bit of an overgeneralization, because I know there are quite a few people on the select board that are making a lot of effort to reach out right now. There are other reasons that I think if you were aware of some of the background on why and wherefore of past decisions of why we didn't collaborate, you would probably agree with the decision that was made. but some of that you can't you know some of it you're you're involved with personnel and you can't just talk about that you know I think Randy was a unique talent you know and many times these collaborative efforts like a police department sharing a police chief it 's dependent on right it works with the right person the right person and did they have another person on deck and, you know, so there's a lot of details there. But I don't want to distract everybody there. But it's not that the select board is not listening. It's not that we aren't getting the message. It is a fairly sizable enterprise to just immediately, you know, start turning right or left or cut out 5%, 10%. You know, you want to be a little more surgical about some of this stuff. So, you know, I'm certainly paying attention to what you guys are saying. And I don't know how much more to say that I'm showing up at every meeting and I'm in multiple meetings off the offline as best I can without violating open meeting. [17:17] Speaker D (unidentified): You know, and I, John, I don't want you to think you're here for a punching bag or what do you [17:23] Mike Boyle: want to call it? No, that's all right. I'm, I, you know, it doesn't, I don't like I say, I don't [17:27] Speaker D (unidentified): take it personally, but it's not directed at you. Don't, okay. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna to do something that I'm going to ask to amend the agenda just for a second. I want to put this one on hold for a second because I want to jump down to request changes for the 28 budget document supporting materials because I think that will help us drive what we're going to ask for this. So I'm going to come back to this. I'm going to ask for a motion on this in a few minutes, but I'm looking for the budget book which I've been looking through to have a little more detail. I'm looking for more detail on a number of different things, and I think that it's probably in a computer program somewhere and would like to be able to say, and one of my questions is to Megan, is this document on a computer where we can tap into it and it's changing every day? That would be one of my thoughts, because if this is a document that I know Walker could tap into it and say, okay, yesterday they bought eight loads of sand, a hundred dollars a load, and today they're buying 10 loads of sand and there's 125 dollars a load. We can use that for an example to work out of. So can we dig deeper into this book other than what it is, or is this what we have? And that can go for every department. There was there was one thing in here I didn't even understand what the word meant. I sound like Clay right now, but I didn't use the [18:58] Speaker G (unidentified): There's a lot of words that I don't understand. [19:00] Speaker D (unidentified): Well, it's part of the thing. [19:02] Speaker F (unidentified): Well, I mean, it's technical jargon by people. [19:05] Speaker D (unidentified): So what I'm asking for is, if I want more detail, how do we get that detail? Do we go to Megan? I actually thought Megan was coming to some of the meetings. [19:18] Mike Boyle: No, but I'm happy to be the messenger and the conduit for any of that information. I'm trying to get clear. When you say you want more detail, if you can be specific, [19:33] Speaker D (unidentified): I can do a better job of responding. I can look at a department's labor cost, but I can't tell you where it breaks down. I can just tell you there's a bulk number at the top. That would be one of my things. But I'm not asking for me. I'm having a conversation with our group, and if our group says, I agree with you, Rick, we'll make a motion, we'll vote the motion, and then we'll say, John, we voted a motion to go to go look for that type of thing, because I think I think if you look at each department, there's 43 people and a budget is X amount of money for grounds and maintenance, but I don't know how that breaks down. How are we ever going to be able to do a comparison to a contractor if we don't know how we're paying it out? [20:28] Mike Boyle: I'm sorry to interrupt, but we did that with the mowing thing, right? [20:32] Speaker D (unidentified): That was a good example. I want it for every department. That's what I'm asking for. I'm not asking for just one. I'm asking for a detail for the payroll. I'm looking for a detail for what Mike Young has to spend his materials on, and I'm looking at those two pickups we're getting ready to buy, two brand new pickups. Is it really worth us to buy two new pickups? And what is the requirement when you look at the pickup here versus the pickup here? You know, I've heard you talk about, you know, the Cadillac versus the Volkswagen. So again, I'm going to go back to Steve. If the town wants this, I'm nobody to change that. But if the transparency is there, so the people in the town can see it, and we can lug it and take a look at it, then I think they can vote with knowledge, not vote by just because the [21:26] Mike Boyle: board says we should vote. Right, so the capital plan is in the budget. That all the aging for the vehicles are in there. So I'm not sure what more [21:35] Speaker D (unidentified): information. I'm pretty sure I haven't dug into that real deep, but I think, I think there's two new vehicles coming up. [21:41] Mike Boyle: Yeah, and I think it would have been detailed in the schedule going out for the next five years. And that's part of what we'll be doing in the next few months is revisiting the capital improvement plan. So, which is what always precedes the budget. [21:58] Speaker D (unidentified): So if we ask for a comparison of a new Volkswagen, and it's $100,000, or we lease a new Volkswagen and [22:08] Mike Boyle: it's $1,000 a month, so you're talking about the difference between, at least in a purchase, that look into cost safe. That's what I'm looking to do, and I [22:17] Speaker D (unidentified): think you have to look at all these avenues yonder to that stuff out. So you [22:21] Mike Boyle: want to see us go through an exercise of showing the logic behind why we would purchase instead of lease. Is that, I'm not, I'm just trying to, yeah, I'm [22:31] Speaker F (unidentified): running the, running the cost comparisons. That's what I'm, right, the mowing, you know, the mowing lent itself to that kind of analysis because you have a private sector that, we have a private contract, so we could, Megan could run the numbers and say, okay, we could do it with this many staff, it would cost us this staff time, which would cost this much, plus the benefits for the staff, plus buying mowers, plus, and Craig was super helpful on that because he has background in that industry and knew, you know, what it was going to cost to start, basically start our own mowing company as a town. So that was super helpful. I've said before, we don't get nearly enough of that in that book, and I think, and not all of it lends itself to it. I mean, you can't, it's hard, you're not going to privatize the police. But you know, we've, when you look at the staffing numbers, for instance, we've hired people to do like buildings and grounds and to go around and do repairs to the buildings, fix the doors and windows and this, not the other thing. A decision was made to no longer contract that, but put two people On the payroll to do that kind of in-house work on all the town properties. What I've never seen is this is the work that was completed by that team. This is what that team costs in salary and benefits and trucks and tools and insurance and overtime and all the rest of that. And here's the value of the things that they did, like if you hired somebody to go do it, what would that cost? So there are, there are places in the budget that lend themselves to that kind of side-by-side. And we, it's hard for us to get it the one play. And I think you're in terms of the salary costs or the staffing costs, I'm with you a hundred percent. That the one number that never appears in that book is overtime. So every year we are told we have to hire more people and more people and more people, particularly police, because overtime costs are out of sight. Overtime costs are huge. And if we, if we paid for these people, if we put these people on staff, we wouldn't have to pay payroll. There's never any numbers attached to any of this. So we don't know in that book it does not say salary, like weekly salary, benefit cost, overtime by staff position. So there's there certainly can be more transparency on [24:44] Speaker G (unidentified): that. And I point that out just because. So can I ask you, would that be seen [24:50] Speaker D (unidentified): on electronic version if we could go there? So my electronic version is the [24:55] Speaker A (unidentified): same thing you get. This is just the Excel that Megan sends me and it print, she just literally prints it to get develop that book. I believe so. There's no more detail in this. It's just formulas to calculate everything. I'm with you on, I would like more information on the numbers behind the numbers, basically, right? Which I think is what you're asking. Which some of that goes into the key performance indicators stuff that we've talked about, you know, because right now the KPI section of this is really sort of just taking whatever the budget spits out and then dividing it by, you know, taxpayer dollars or something. You know, it's not, it's sort of derivative. [25:31] Speaker G (unidentified): It's not actually, exactly. [25:33] Speaker A (unidentified): It's not actually what's driving, what's creating the payroll numbers. So, you know, that's things to me like, you know, I learned why do we need so many plow trucks and so many staff? Well, it's because we have this many plow routes. You know, that's not a, you know, that's a number that needs to appear once, but I don't think it does appear anywhere. You know, it's not something that changes, you know, every month. Similar things for police. You know, how do we, how many hours do we need to fill in a week? And, you know, so you can figure out, well, overtime then would be this. You know, there's more calculations you can do if you have some of those basic numbers like that. Because I don't know how to staff a police department. You know, I don't know what the right staffing overlap is and, you know how many wage hours do you need to you know pay basically so I agree I would like to see more of that and I'd like you know I know Megan's working on a KPI redo or something so I'm curious what comes out of that but yeah just so [26:33] Mike Boyle: I understand what you want is more detail on the overtime part of the budget in all departments that I would like my personal look and I've only [26:43] Speaker D (unidentified): looked at this just quick like and I'm not asking I would like more detail on salaries on how much it's working to make it work and how one of the visions that I see happening right now is adding another person and when you do the comparative to your local towns and I've heard that three or four times here tonight we've got the biggest staff town there is do I do I 'll make it I'm sure Jeff's got it I'm not here to cut anybody I'm not here to damage anybody's career I'm not here to change any of that but I am here to say do we really need that do we need to do more or can we do with what we've got right now and kind of look and say where can we go from here you know and how does that work if we had to engineer something look at the engineering cost and say, hey, that's the cost that we have to do because we didn't put somebody on, and if that's repetitive year after year after year after year, I justify that position. But if it's not, it's growing very fast, $4 million, $5 million, very fast. [28:02] Mike Boyle: Yeah, in terms of staffing, the big hit was adding the EMS. That was eight positions. So just to be clear, it's not like everything else is, like, you know, just going off the charts yeah the buildings and grounds did add some people I think that's a that's a reasonable thing to look at and just say are we still is that still making sense there's a lot of anecdotal stuff about that but anyway I overtime really the only places we pay overtime that I'm aware of our police EMS Public Works is there some other place that I'm missing [28:38] Speaker G (unidentified): I don't know. I'm not the one to ask. [28:40] Mike Boyle: Yeah, well, everybody else is salaried, so I don't think, and even with public works, I know when there's overtime, like during the winter months, they get comp time off in the summer months. So, you know, there's a different type of, quote, overtime there. [29:00] Speaker F (unidentified): Yeah, we just don't have a total compensation number. Number and so in within the police if it's only let's take the police for example if that's the only department there should be a budget line in there that has overtime going back to the last five six years so we can see over time because again we get this argument every year about overtime without any numbers to back it up and so all right that would be super helpful so when I did so remember this the top spending items thing that I the back of that shows the staffing increases. John's right that for the most part, it's been flat other than the police. This is from FY22 to FY27, so over five years. Most of the staffing has remained stable. We added two positions in buildings and grounds. Those are the ones that I talked about where we replaced contractors. We went from five police officers to seven. [29:53] Mike Boyle: Yeah, and just if I can jump in briefly to point out that the process we used on the last budget cycle when John wanted an additional position, that got pretty well blown out in terms of not being approved. [30:13] Speaker D (unidentified): The engineer position. The engineer position. I think that engineer position or all positions should be talked with the board before it is even advertised. [30:23] Mike Boyle: It got killed. It got killed. [30:25] Speaker D (unidentified): But what about the people that spent their time? It was advertised before. That's what I'm saying. It was advertised. [30:33] Mike Boyle: I wouldn't have advertised it before. I'd put it through a budget if it were me. So that was a timing thing. [30:39] Speaker D (unidentified): But that's a message I would like to send. If the Board agrees with me, I'd like to send that message. Don't do that until they talk about it. Because they already had it posted. They already had it going. [30:50] Mike Boyle: No, I'm not disagreeing with you, Rick. I appreciate it. But anyway, just to get back, Steve, finish what you were going to say because I wanted to hear the rest of it, and I interrupted you. [30:59] Speaker F (unidentified): Only what the change was. EMS is obviously the big one. It was eight positions, so that was the big one. And then planning and community development was the other one, and that one's hazy because there's half positions, and then one year there's a position and a half, and then it goes back, and there's a seven-tenths of a position, and that one's harder to track. But we have three positions in the budget for planning and community development, and that's the other big added staff. This is how we got from 30 people in FY 22. Remember, this is not 2002, this is five years ago. We had 33, 30 people, 30.7, and now we have 44. We had 14 staff positions in five years, and they're [31:39] Speaker D (unidentified): going to say Adams EMS, Steve, go ahead. My [31:44] Speaker H (unidentified): initial research of the different towns and the management personnel that the towns had hired, there was a fair discrepancy between the philosophies and the finances. A good example was Boothay. Even though they didn't have as many miles of roads to maintain as Canada, they had figured instead of increasing their staff for the highway department, it was less expensive to subcontract out a certain amount of their work rather than taking on the personnel and having to pay all the expenses that they required. That was true also on administration. Most of the towns we have, we have a number of, I think at the last count it was 12 or 12 and a half personnel, and they would subcontract out certain requirements for the town rather than hiring someone full time for it. So I think a lot of the costs that we found out in our research is that by subcontracting some of these costs, it eliminated the town expenses. So I think Rockport is, and for example, the police department, I think between Rockport and Camden, we have, I think Rockport is five police officers, maybe Camden is seven or eight. But we have 13, I think, police officers canvassing our municipality, and again, that's an opportunity where you could maybe modify that relationship or combine the relationship, and I know at one point we had a combined police fire police chief, and now that's gone back, I think, to two separate. So anyway, I think there's a lot of opportunity for this town to look at our personnel and maybe subcontract out some of that work and reduce our overhead as a community, because if you look at our overhead and our cost to those major departments, it far exceeds most towns our size and community equivalents. [34:07] Speaker F (unidentified): The other thing we talked about that came out of last year's budget, I think we had a budget item on this actually, which wasn't much money, but it was something was deploying technology to do some of this, like how can we and no look, nobody wants to take anybody's job, but technology takes jobs all the time. I mean, it's you know becomes efficient and you know, there's if I'm thinking you had to like I'm in my mind I'm writing what I would like to see in John Duke's letter, his budget letter and one of the chunks I want to see is this is what we've done on regionalization per what John was saying, but you know the conversations are taking place, but also what in what ways have we used technology. We just we're talking about how AI helped us write the minutes to the meeting and as you know it's improving effectiveness, businesses are using it widely. I would love to hear when you guys budget time for John Duke to say in his letter that's at the front of that binder where he gets to lay out this is why the budget says what it says, here's the things that we did, here's the things you'll see in the budget, we're my proposal to spend on this or that. I would love to see how he's thinking about deploying technology. Regionalization is [35:18] Speaker D (unidentified): is one thing for sure. You guys you guys recommended increases in those budgets for that much money, there was it was I don't know exactly what it was, there's [35:25] Speaker F (unidentified): something in there I don't for training, yeah I think it was, which would be nice [35:29] Speaker D (unidentified): to hear back how that was, how that was utilized, so I guess I'm not gonna [35:35] Speaker F (unidentified): have I mean it's only it's only October, so they won't you know when you said before can we get real-time numbers, we won't have real-time numbers on most of [35:43] Speaker D (unidentified): that stuff. They have until and that was my other question, well in my other question was tonight is when from my question I hope you guys think about this, when do we expect the book John, when do we expect the book. I know the book came out really late last year, when and the budget vote is when the [36:12] Mike Boyle: schedule, I'll go on last year's schedule Rick if you want, yeah please. March 2nd was when the budgets were delivered to both the select board and the Budget committee, so that's the first peak that any anybody has at it outside of the town staff or John Duke, okay. So in the point at which we met to have the final budget committee meeting would have been yeah it was in April sometimes, yeah April 3rd, yeah but we have we have all our meetings, the big meetings are always in March, you know where we're All in the room and okay, you know, talking to everybody that's based on last year. Now, you know, you guys want to recommend we start earlier, that's reasonable. You know, you don't want, I think the more that one [37:18] Speaker D (unidentified): of the reasons I gave all my handouts were the more information everybody has, the more informed they are, the more transparent they can be, and figure out how they want to do it. So hey, I'm not gonna say if they come out with it in January, February, here it is, I'm not saying I don't want that too much, say hey, I've been, I've been doing budgets a long time, you know how I do my budgets, probably a lot where you guys do them, I take last year's budget and I say what do I need to do, so what I'm saying is that I think each one of the departments here in the town [37:58] Speaker C (unidentified): comes through with their numbers, okay, probably not till January, and then they sit down with John and talk about what they want to do this year, knowing what they did last year. [38:07] Speaker D (unidentified): Yeah, but if you're doing a budget, you've done them for a long time, you know, you sit and you think, okay, it's not going to be a big surprise what we're going to ask for, because it, we know what we're doing, you know, that's why we have these leaders that are doing that. I don't disagree with that, I'm just saying this [38:24] Speaker C (unidentified): discussions between John what he's going to present to us, yeah, right, with each [38:29] Speaker F (unidentified): department, right, and the problem go, I hate to keep coming back to this, but I'm quite proud of it, do you don't really hate it Steve, I mean the challenge, the challenge has not been taking the work that the town has always done for 25 years or 30 years, and increasing it by 4% or 5% a year. I mean, my chart, you have that little 5% line. That green line is 5% increase. So for years, that's what it was. It just sort of went up and went up and went up because we did just what you said. What it was last year, and it was more expensive, the pavement was more expensive, the staff was more expensive, the insurance was more expensive. It just, that's what it was. And the reason I'm on this committee because I woke up one day and saw the red line, and that's, that red line is not because we took what we were doing last year and what that became, that became ridiculously more expensive. The red line is there because we started doing things that we were not doing before, like we took on new things, we hired people to do things that we had not hired people to do before, so that's why the line went up, so rather than pay a EMS contract there was a few hundred Thousand dollars we decided to spend a million dollars a year running our own EMS. That's why the number looks like that. So I'm with you on tracking those increases over time, but I think what's been, what has been valuable for us to work on is identifying those fast-moving areas, because that's where the red line comes from. It's, it's, it's that stuff that's the new, where the town made a decision we can do this as we have done it regionally or otherwise or under contract and decided, nope, we're going to add all of the staff and we go from 28 people to 44 people because of a policy decision, not because those things became more expensive. We just decided that we're going to do it differently in a way that's more expensive, as it turns out. [40:26] Speaker C (unidentified): John, is your meeting with the Camden Select Board, is that an open meeting or is that a closed meeting? [40:30] Mike Boyle: I think all meetings are open. So whether there will be public comment or anything like that, I don't think so. But I think, again, it's the first of what I hope is a lot of conversations to come. [40:43] Speaker C (unidentified): I'm just thinking about what our committee here can do, to be honest with you. When you get to things like EMS, which I guess they don't want to discuss at this point with Camden, doesn't want to discuss it with us. [40:55] Mike Boyle: Let me just say that tonight at the select board meeting in Camden, and I believe they're looking at a decision to apply for a license to have their own EMS department. So apparently, they're moving away from, I mean, if I'm understanding that right, they're moving away from the outside contracting for EMS, which, again, that's relatively new information to me. I didn't, until I saw the agenda, I didn't know that was even a thing. But now it makes sense why it wasn't, why they said they didn't want to talk about it. I just [41:33] Speaker C (unidentified): keep coming back to what our committee should be doing. So we talk about like EMS, we talk about these other big areas, and speaking with us to what we can actually do with this committee at this [41:42] Mike Boyle: time. Well, I think, I think the capital plan is a good place for this committee to focus, because there's some big expenses in there, you know, that are going to be pulling on the budget quite a bit in the years ahead. I think it's reasonable to look at overtime costs, but some of it you've got to remember is we've got unions involved and contracts, and what are we going to really be able to do with some of that stuff? Part of that conversation about merging, I don't want to get too far down a rabbit hole, part of the conversation about merging police departments for instance, there are two different unions. And if you try to merge with even like Rockland, for instance, that's in third union. So you've got to get everybody to decide to go to quit all three unions and go to one union. It's just after a while, you look at it, you want to go out of the room screaming. Because it's a great concept, but the reality is so. One of the areas that I'm kind of getting more bullish on as public works frankly as far as regionalization goes I think you know you got group purchasing involved you got you know you're you're plowing roads you know one block away from where your other also plowing roads and you know how complicated I mean again maybe but again you've got two unions so I don't know how that's going to work yeah who would help us with that Well, it's on the agenda for the meeting later this month with Camden. So, like I said, I don't know where that will go. Yeah. But, you know, you could just start with a baby step of trying to, you know, see if you can do some better group purchasing. Those are some easy places to save money. [43:31] Speaker F (unidentified): So, Rick, on that, something else to put in the budget binder, the union contract. Because two of them were signed the night before the election in June. [43:45] Speaker D (unidentified): So let's let's let's go into making a few motions then I'm gonna I'm gonna pull us back to the to the budget goals because I got a pretty good idea what I'm hearing around the table and I'm just going to ask if somebody would like to make a motion for a budget goal for the coming year you're [44:11] Mike Boyle: Talking about a financial target or I'm talking about increase percentage [44:15] Speaker D (unidentified): Percentage increase for the for us to ask you guys to try to stay within you know the select board to stay within but because I feel like we can sit here for the night and talk about it but until we have some vote yay or nay your conversation John Back's not going to be as good as it's going to be to say hey they voted on it they asked for this so that's that's where That's where I'm going with this quorum. [44:41] Speaker B (unidentified): So I have a question about that. One question I have is about the budget deficit. So from what I was looking at in the book, we've been running a budget deficit for a number of years. Is that true? I don't know. [45:03] Mike Boyle: It's not legal to run a budget deficit. You have to you have to have to pay the bills. Yeah, you can only spend what your voters have approved, and you know that you have to have the revenue to pay for it. Okay, so there is no [45:16] Speaker B (unidentified): ongoing budget no deficit. Okay, so then whatever the budget is, the town has to raise [45:25] Mike Boyle: the money in order to support that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, there was a I don't know if you saw Terry if There is an issue that in terms of, you know, we have, when we have a surplus, you know, what, where should that surplus, we occasionally will have funds that came in and expenses that didn't materialize against those funds. Right now there aren't many, and I'm generalizing here and I could be wrong on some of this, But as far as I know, there's not like a lot of incentives for any given departmental budget or person managing those budgets to come in under the expense line that's been budgeted for them because it's sort of a use it or lose it notion. Right. You know, and if you don't spend it this year, then next year, you know. You're going to get less. You're going to get less kind of thing. So there's all that normal human nature stuff that you see in the private sector, but blah,, blah. But in the public sector, it really is a use it or lose it. It can go into the unassigned fund balance, and typically it does. I don't know what the guidelines are necessarily for how long it can stay in there, and I think at some point that you have to catch up to that. This is more of a Megan question, frankly. But there are some things that I've suggested under incentivizing cost savings, you know, in that kind of a situation where, you know, to incentivize a given department saying, well, okay, we'll put that into a vehicle reserve, which is a much better, you know, way to run things, frankly, because it puts stuff in reserve, which is always a good thing to do in my mind. So that you can pull from that when you need it down the road. You maybe don't have to spend that much in your capital improvement plan now because you've built up your reserves. I mean, Clay has given us a lot of previews on the value of reserves in past budget cycles. [47:40] Speaker B (unidentified): So if we set an arbitrary number, let's say 1%, we want to cap the budget at a 1% increase for the coming year, Then how does that address the cost of health insurance that goes up every year, the salaries that go up every year? [47:59] Mike Boyle: Inflation alone is 3.8%. [48:01] Speaker B (unidentified): Inflation and the cost of diesel fuel and prices that are just going up like crazy. So then how do we deal with that? To me, setting an arbitrary one percent number means that every unit is going to [48:22] Mike Boyle: have to cut. Yeah, where I go with some of that, I'm sorry to jump into this conversation, but you know, just to come up with one percent that, you know, like, what, why, where's, what, and where are you thinking that's gonna come from? Do we have a, an idea on that? Because you can't just like, you don't go across the board toward whatever that is, because you're talking about already being bound to Walker's earlier point. You've got some contractual obligations that are already in place, so you have to be somewhat cognizant of that when you come up with those numbers. I'm not suggesting that a number, rather than, I like to see some logic. [49:04] Speaker B (unidentified): That's why I'm asking the question, because it seems like picking an arbitrary number to goal would be challenging. [49:10] Speaker A (unidentified): I think the trick is that it not be completely arbitrary. Contrary. The idea is that it has some anchor, which last year it did. Last year, the same dynamics were at play. You still had cost of living. You still had step increases. You still had all the contractual increases. You still had a lot of uncertainty in the global economy and whatnot. Personally, I felt like there was, you know, so you knew you had a few hundred thousand dollars of new expenses coming down the pike, but I thought we could, we could probably save six figures in health insurance, and we did. And so that's how I felt like 1% is actually an easy number to hit, and voila, it was. We got it to be negative. And everything continued. Right. [49:50] Speaker F (unidentified): And the staff had time to write social media posts about how wonderful it is that we've held the budget flat. Exactly. And we've been celebrating and talking about how wonderful it is, and somehow everything's gone. [50:00] Speaker A (unidentified): Everywhere the envy of mid-caste. Yeah, everybody's looking. [50:04] Speaker C (unidentified): So what if we talked about a 2% max next year? Right, I mean, we know you're going to always automatic expenses with the cost of living wages and so forth, but if we had a goal of not more than two percent increase in expenses and just everybody then has to go back into the departments and look and see [50:22] Speaker D (unidentified): How they can cut and get their numbers down each place. So I really like everything that's being said, and I want to throw in there as a as what I've been looking in the book. I also think that there's a lot of rounding up of numbers, so 2% I think is very doable, and I and I think that because when I look at some of these numbers and how they figure things out, it's like we're at an $800 cost and we round it up to a thousand dollar bill, and it's like I think we really need the leaders to know it's an $800 cost, it's not a thousand. This year and next year it's 2% above that. I think I think our department heads realize this. They run their budgets at home. They understand what that means. So I'm very supportive of conversation continuing and seeing what others have to say before we make that. [51:21] Speaker H (unidentified): Steve, go for it. Do we ever want to consider the fact that our budget compared to similar towns on the coast of Maine is 2, 3, 400, 4 million dollars higher that do we ever want to consider that we could cut our budget well so that 's where my [51:42] Speaker A (unidentified): ambivalence web to. I think if we do nothing else, 2% is about where I would land, you know. I think if the town doesn't change anything, then I think that's a reasonable goal that I think the town can hit, and I think it puts enough pressure on, you know, each department to be efficient, provides enough room for the contractual changes, but is there something bigger? Is there a bigger sort of strategy that you can implement? And that's where I think EMS is one of the few areas I see potential leverage. [52:11] Speaker H (unidentified): What we're doing right now is accepting the standard that we already have in all of our departments. And the question is, if we don't want to analyze our departments and whether they're operating efficiently or whether we can subcontract out some of that work, then we're going to just keep going every year on the 2% or 3% and feel pretty good about that. I think that we as a community have to, or the budget committee anyway, has to evaluate, are we going to accept the overhead that we already have and the budget that we've already maintained? Well, I mean, our budget I think doubled in four years. Are we going to just accept that now moving forward and nibble around the edges for two and three percent every year? If our goal is the two or three percent a year, I think that's very doable, but the real issue is, are we just going to accept what we've already incurred over the last four years? And I think that, to me, is the purpose of this committee, to me it is anyway. I think that any person in this room can control two or three percent a year. Based on inflation, but the real issue is, why are we accepting the budget that we've inherited at this point? That, to me, is why this committee got organized originally, and if we're not going to do that, I don't have any interest in continuing the process that we did last year. And now what I'm hearing is that we're going to be content with a two or three percent budget, so I'm just not interested in looking at that type of process moving forward because we haven't accomplished anything. Rockport is the cream of the crop, financially, in mid-coast Maine. We're all towns of our population base and our current situation, so. [54:25] Speaker C (unidentified): Steve, I agree with you 100%. The only thing I keep saying is that, as a committee, then, we've got to figure out what it is, okay, where it is that we're going to say to the town, we need to make a major change and come up with- [54:36] Speaker H (unidentified): That is John Lehman's proposal, and I think that is going to be very telling. Even though you think that someone will go to the poll and say, I like my fire department, the police department, I think when people — and I think in talking to John, the way you phrase the questions in the poll, it's going to be very clear as to how that question is phrased, whether someone is going to say that we need to spend X number of dollars on police or fire protection. So I don't think someone, even though they like all the services they have, and then John can, we've talked about how a formula is produced and a questionnaire is produced to get real answers as to people's true feelings. I mean, even if everyone enjoys the police fire and all of our amenities, if you phrase the questions, and you can introduce more information than I can, but I think people will honestly answer the question, not just arbitrarily, do you like all the services we have? If you get into specific details, I think we can get a real definitive answer from the public. And I'll bet, I'm guessing, that most people that live in this community that have been here a long time are astounded at the increase that has occurred in the last four years. And I think my goal on this committee, if the survey proves correct, our goal is to reduce the budget and not continue the 2% or 3% inflation. [56:21] Speaker C (unidentified): Again, I agree with you. I mean, the question here, though, is you have to come up with some very good questions. Like, if we would say for an ambulance to come five minutes longer than it took before, what the cost savings is if we had a different way of serving, again, our public safety. [56:40] Mike Boyle: CHRIS RODGERS- Yeah, there's a couple different kind of surveys we're looking at, just to clarify. So there's some, one is leveraging technology. Steve, you'll appreciate this, so it's called Flash Vote, and it, you identify, this is going to get us off subject. If you guys want to go there, I'm happy to walk you through how we're [57:07] Speaker G (unidentified): gonna survey, but could we stay on the target question? All right, I think that's [57:11] Speaker F (unidentified): okay, and this will shock you to hear that I'm deeply skeptical about the survey. This is my years in politics. I know that surveys can be made to say whatever they, the people writing them, want them to say, just to show you on this. [57:34] Speaker A (unidentified): What's that? It's my favorite chart. What's that? It's my favorite chart. Your [57:39] Speaker F (unidentified): favorite chart. Okay, so I don't, I think I might have emailed this to you, but I don't know if I've talked about it. So the, in terms of this spending target [57:46] Speaker G (unidentified): question. I've already rephrased it in my mind. Yeah, what I've wrestled with is to [57:51] Speaker F (unidentified): this, like, how do you make it so it's not arbitrary? I'm with you 100%, like, we're gonna get to something that is doable. So all I did here is I tracked, the green line is that historic 5% for years and years and years and years. The budget just went prepped up 5% year in and year out, and that's always been the target up until FY22 and FY23, and it started to take off. So that green dotted line is if we had just stayed on that 5% annual growth, this is painful to look at because today's budget, if we were still on that 5% growth rate, would be, what, four million dollars left less five million dollars left i mean it's just a staggering amount so i also appreciate you can't come in we're not going to just shut down the ms it's going to take you know it takes far longer to unwind costs when we do them than to you know it's easy to go and start an ems and hire eight people and start it up. Getting out of it into something that's more cost effective is going to take us some time. So the blue is like could we project out cuts, sort of a glide path back to, by FY32, we're back where we would otherwise have been if we had just stayed on that 5% growth trajectory. In my mind, that gets us back to the town has historically been fine with budgets of that growth. The budgets have passed, but I will remind everybody that the budget before this last one passed by 30 votes. [59:24] Speaker D (unidentified): I was going to bring that up. [59:25] Speaker F (unidentified): 25 votes or something like that. So we know there's pressure. The fact that the select board leadership and the town is spending a lot of time telling everybody how flat the budget is and how the budget didn't go up tells you that they are responding to public pressure about the budget. So we know the public is unhappy with this red line. Now you're right, we've got to figure out what they're prepared to give up to get the red line under control, but going back to the subject of a spending like a what would I say if John Duke was sitting here and he asked what would you like me to come back with the budget, I would say I want a budget with about three hundred thousand dollars worth of cuts because I want us to get I don't I don't need to go back I don't need four million dollars worth of cuts. It's going to take us a while to do this, but if we can get on a trajectory that's going to get us back to a sustainable level of spending growth as a town I'm on board. I don't need a million dollars in cut, I don't need two million dollars a cut, but I'm not I'm not signing off on a two percent increase as a target. Do you know what percent that is? I don't know, what would you say? I mean you're going from 12.5 to 12.2, what is that, minus [1:00:34] Speaker G (unidentified): three percent, minus that's three [1:00:37] Speaker A (unidentified): minus two percent, two percent, two percent on decrease, yeah, so three percent cut, so if I [1:00:44] Mike Boyle: Could just jump in a little bit on this to Steve's red line just so you guys have the little of context for some of this. And this was well before my being on the select board, so you know, I'm, I would offer that a big part of why the line was relatively slowly rising was because when you want one of the big levers as a select board has in a budget is things like paving. And we were well off the pace of 12% of our roads being paved each year. Well off. And what was happening is we would get into these roads then that we did have to repave and we would find that the subsurface had seriously deteriorated and it cost even more money than before. So we ended up having a significant amount of adjustment in that first bump is that something that we can see on paper other [1:01:48] Speaker D (unidentified): words can they can they show us when they started to do that I think that [1:01:51] Speaker F (unidentified): goodness it's at one of the fastest-growing spending categories we're [1:01:55] Speaker G (unidentified): gonna show it by the year yeah not on this but in that's what I'm asking in [1:01:58] Speaker D (unidentified): the budget in this year that this is talked about it'd be nice to see that I [1:02:03] Mike Boyle: think that would take a lot of heat off in that yeah well I'm just pointing out a few of the big drivers that I went through and did a Steve Graf. And I put in some assumptions. MIKE BOYLE. Where is it? I want to see it. MIKE BOYLE. Right here. And I built in the assumption of if you had just done those things, and then you put in, I put it against cost of living adjustment. I put it in against inflation and just watched year over year. And my chart comes out with the same kind of bump because of some of these big decisions that were made, right or wrong. But paving had been put off by, I can't speak to motivations, but if I were trying to balance a budget, one of the big ticket items is roads. And it had been pushed down. That can had been kicked down the road. And even to the point where we had to get a bond to get caught up. And now we're paying the bond payments on that deferred maintenance for roads. So that was the first big bump. The second big bump coming out of the COVID pandemic, we were having a hard time even finding people applying for jobs. So we did a market study on compensation. We found we were way off on a bunch of positions. We had to do some other things to try and work on retention. I wasn't involved, but there was an outside firm hired to do this based on their recommendations. They made some big adjustments in salaries, added the step increase mechanism, which I'm not a big fan of on some levels, but I was glad to see it was reeled in a little bit by your group, Walker. Or the really big one was the full-time EMS. And that kind of happened not overnight. So there was some additional staff that trickled in, and then suddenly the full eight hit. So that was a big one. And then the paving policy you're going to see in the capital improvement plan that Mike Young is putting together, that we're finally We're finally at the point where he's now seeing off five years that paving is now going to start to taper back a little bit. So we will start to see some savings. Because we've been maintaining this 12% policy, and that was a new thing, and that's what John brought in when he came in. He looked at that and recommended we change that pace. Now, I wasn't in that conversation, but it appears to have been sound decision-making, because in the long term we're now about to realize oh great finally we can you know keep on this pace not end up paying more than you know one and a half times more because we didn't do the road when we should have done it I [1:05:08] Speaker D (unidentified): think I think that's great John and I appreciate that what I'm what I'm thinking is transparency about that so if they made those decisions and they could show us how they made those decisions I think that would help us understand why we're the red line is where it is and I understand Steve's thought down at the end he doesn't want to nickel and dime it and I understand where Steve's coming from over on this end I think we all have our own thoughts we all want to do something, we don't want to waste our time being here, let's face it we're here to make something work but the transparency part of that is can we get that information to go with the red line from the department In other words, can Mike Young show us that, okay, this happened from this point, now we had to jump up here and we're going to this point? [1:06:00] Mike Boyle: I did all this from the budget book. I asked one or two questions of Megan to just clarify to make sure I got it right. [1:06:07] Speaker D (unidentified): Mike should be able to do this. [1:06:09] Mike Boyle: Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with you. [1:06:11] Speaker D (unidentified): I'm asking for that, for transparency, because then when we say to the townspeople, people, you've got this budget, people. This is what it is and this is why it is. They're going to vote it in 100%. They're not going to vote it in with 35 extra votes and what they did. [1:06:27] Mike Boyle: We have Mike in. You can ask him these questions, and he's going to be presenting his capital. [1:06:33] Speaker D (unidentified): I think he should be prepared, though. I think that they should be understanding that this is the stuff we're asking for tonight. [1:06:38] Speaker G (unidentified): This is it, right? Am I- Well, he'll come in during the hearing process and defend the budget that- But how are you going to make a decision [1:06:45] Speaker D (unidentified): tonight on what you want to do and this is what we get on the agenda if we don't really know what we're doing so we're gonna have to put something on we don't want to put 2% down because Steve's gonna leave not come and come back we don't want to tell them that we're gonna shut everybody down and not give everybody in the town at 3% we're not gonna do that we don't want to take people and suffer that way yeah I mean I'm looking for a motion on how to move this forward that's simple as I'm trying to do here guys it's a matter of how we approach this [1:07:17] Speaker C (unidentified): and to me we're sitting in October now and I think we need to give them if we want to have a target give them a target and I'd say like two percent thinking about the cost of living to it but the bigger issue for me is we know that we've got to do Steve's thing here and get it down we need to take a big area and get a big bump down yeah but I mean in October this year we're not [1:07:38] Speaker D (unidentified): going to figure this out so i agree and you guys will look at me like i'm the devil and the demon here i'm saying i want to give a motion that we can vote on john can go back and lug it back to the board and say geez they put a lot of thought into this and they 'd like to do a one and a half or two percent they'd like to honor that but they really like to see this red line stop and really would like to see this red line take a dip back the other way but we're going to [1:08:07] Speaker C (unidentified): have to be the people I think they're going to say how that red line is going to go down [1:08:10] Speaker D (unidentified): yeah where the people are going to have to do that then we need we need transparency to do that we need to see how they got there I need to see how Mike got from spending 10 tons of time to 30 tons of time and why he did that I can't make a judgment if I don't give him the honor to show me what he did you see what I'm saying so I'm asking for a little bit of transparency there I'm asking [1:08:35] Speaker C (unidentified): for but how does that get us to the next what I'm saying I agree with we need the transparency but we want to make a decision tonight on what our goal is and what we want to have reduced now [1:08:47] Speaker D (unidentified): and so forth we're not going to have time for mike to come in here explain i agree i agree i'm i'm just throwing this out here so you guys can understand where i'm i 'm not sure [1:08:58] Speaker F (unidentified): I buy that it's this committee's responsibility, if we decide we want a flat budget, to then go in without all the fiscal information that they are going to have driving the budget, about the cost of diesel and the rest of that, and figure out where those cuts are going to come from. I think as we, because we didn't do it last time. [1:09:15] Speaker D (unidentified): I can tell you the cost of diesel is not costing you an extra $4 million over the past few years. [1:09:20] Speaker F (unidentified): No,. What I'm saying is last time around we set this goal of 1% and we did not then sit as a committee and spend weeks and weeks going through where is this one percent going to come up with. The message got sent and John came in here with a basically it wasn't initially flat but it was very [1:09:39] Speaker C (unidentified): close to flat off the bat. So I think it's unusual Steve last year because [1:09:47] Speaker F (unidentified): Walker knew and the rest of us, but it can't be done. John didn't have to worry about a thing. Well I know he got out and he got a nice reprieve from having to make any hard decisions here, but I'm just, but that, so the question is, does this committee send the message that, okay, you made all the easy decisions last year, and now we're content to see this start to climb back up again? Or are we going to communicate, look, we appreciate the flat budget. We appreciate it thanks to Walker and the work of the team. They found a way to do it. We still have enormous costs here, and they have to be put under control. So don't come back in here as though this is the new reset, like this is it. This is the new baseline is this amount of money that we spend this year and now we can expect it to go up two, three, four, five percent a year from here on out. I want the message to be sent, I do, and I don't speak for the committee, but I want the message to be sent. I don't think this is sustainable for the town and we have to reverse course on some of this stuff. I can't sit here tonight and say I want X percent from EMS and X percent for this, next one for that. I'm confident that sufficiently Motivated and working with the other towns, they could come back in here and say we're swapping more police so we cut a police position and we did this and we're going to start sharing planning and we can, I mean, there's ways to do it, but we can't see, I don't, I don't want us to sit here and say because we can't tonight figure out where a cut of 300,000 is going to come from, therefore we should not say to John you should be aiming [1:11:15] Speaker C (unidentified): for a cut of 300,000. But if you give John the goal of cutting 300,000 and he comes back to this committee and says we've gone through everything and we cannot cut it by three hundred [1:11:25] Speaker F (unidentified): thousand, then I, then that's when we'll see why that can't be done. I don't think we have enough [1:11:29] Speaker C (unidentified): time, in other words, for that all to happen. In other words, he's going to come back and say well I can't cut three hundred thousand dollars and we're going to say well here's how you cut it. Right, what else is going to happen? He's going to come back and say we can't do it. Well, I understand [1:11:42] Speaker F (unidentified): in which case we have to decide as a committee do we support the budget or don't we, do we believe [1:11:47] Speaker C (unidentified): them or don't we, okay, and then that's an up and down vote. Yeah, okay, so we as a committee couldn't, you should not go through these numbers. No, I challenge everything and say John you should have cut here, you should cut here because here are the numbers we don't think are right. I don't think [1:12:01] Speaker F (unidentified): we have information enough to make that decision and that's my point. We need to get into three or four items here, yeah, and start digging in, even take two. Did you know, I'm not, I 'm not disputing that, I think we should have a whole session on just EMS, I think we should bring back a bunch of people who are involved in those EMS decisions other than the chief. There were task forces and working groups done with Camden and done alone, there's mounds of paperwork about how this decision was made, there was a lot of community discussion about it, all of that has been swept away. I think we can, we could spend a whole evening here talking with community experts about EMS and talking about why there are other ways to do this. What would it talk about? I mean, we can do [1:12:37] Speaker C (unidentified): that, but I think we're going to spend a lot of time if we don't have other communities that want to work with us, it's a waste of time in my opinion, if we don't have anybody else that wants [1:12:45] Speaker F (unidentified): to work with us. Well, that's, this returns to the challenge that I floated at the top, which is we [1:12:51] Speaker C (unidentified): Don't have leadership, this town is not going to say we don't want to have ambulances. No, I agree, they've got to have some kind of, you know, program. And if we delay the vote on the budget until [1:13:01] Speaker H (unidentified): the next meeting, yeah, and then between now and the next meeting try to figure out based on what you just said where we could recommend the reduction in the cost, at least we can have an open debate as to where we think we could make those cuts. It can be a general discussion on any and all items, and if we think we can do that, then we could have that discussion next week and vote on it. And if people think we can't make the cuts, they're going to vote one way. I'm certainly going to vote the other way because I think we can make the cuts, but at least we could come back [1:13:43] Speaker C (unidentified): with recommendations. That's a proposal. Somebody's going to have to go back and talk about those cuts, Steve, and what's the basis for them. So we were talking about overhead costs, overtime costs that we'd like information on. We talked about looking at the capital plan as a place that we possibly could make some recommendations, right? And we, you know, we talked about incentives for each one to the department managers too, but somehow we're going to come up with what is the areas that we're [1:14:11] Speaker A (unidentified): going to say this is where you got to cut, right? Well, and I think timing with monthly meetings, you know, the departments are going to be working on their budgets, you know, next month, [1:14:22] Speaker H (unidentified): probably right. We could make quick, we could not wait a month, we could have an earlier meeting if we want just to get this budget squared away. I'm [1:14:35] Speaker D (unidentified): I'm fine with that. I'm fine with that. I think I think as I look around the room, I think the room's fine with that. I think what we should do is make a motion that we're going to table the goal for the budget for the month, come back with a goal, but I'd like to make a motion that we'd like to send to the select board that we'd really like to see this budget be reversed, which means basically it needs, and I want to put this in here, it wants to be flat budget with the exception of taking care of the staff. So if the staff doesn't have to go home and think that staff doesn't need to go home thinking that they're worried about how they're gonna take care of their bills, okay? They're dedicated, they're taking care of us, they'll take care of us even more, but get together and figure out how we can reverse this budget from going up and bring it back down, okay? I'm sure Chat GPT or whoever that guy is can help you with that. Could you help me in between? He's a helpful guy. He is. [1:15:46] Speaker C (unidentified): He is. Rich, my only, I keep bringing the same thing up but if I was on the select board and you came to me and you came to me and said I want you to drop this curve down by 300,000 I'm gonna say you 're the Budget Committee you come back and tell us you've gone through all expenses we're spending each year you come back and tell us what your recommendation is I guess what our job [1:16:08] Speaker D (unidentified): is, and to do that I'm gonna come back and say I need to know where we went from 10 ton to 20 ton. Maybe we can't afford 20 ton. Maybe we're not at that spot in our life today to buy 20 ton of tar, and I need the transparency to do [1:16:25] Speaker C (unidentified): that. We need to get the numbers then and come up with our recommendation based on what you're [1:16:29] Speaker D (unidentified): talking about. Yeah, because I think in due respect to everybody that made the decision to go to 20 ton, they should have the right to explain why they went to 20 ton. Okay, I understand that, but we can't afford to do that, and the townspeople need to understand if they really want to afford to do that, here's your budget. It's not going to go flatline anymore. It's going to continue to go up. And there's a number of different expenses like that. And it's not, Steve, don't believe me. I think the world of your work. But it's not $3 or $6 a gallon diesel fuel that's driving these budgets. [1:17:04] Speaker F (unidentified): No, we know what's driving these budgets. [1:17:05] Speaker D (unidentified): It's not an electric bill that's driving these budgets. [1:17:07] Speaker F (unidentified): The answer to where to look for cuts is where did the spending come from? We added two positions in buildings and grounds that should be eliminated. And we should go back to contract because it cost us less. [1:17:19] Speaker D (unidentified): Well, in due respect for them too, we need to let them present what they're doing to say what they were paid for. Well that, yeah, I to judge it, I think there's to do that, but I think which my feeling is you take it and take a look at it and say okay, is there a spot we can turn this around? Because that's the real message we're sending for John to take down for us. That's that's what we're sending, right? I think we're agreeing, but I'm not entirely sure. [1:17:47] Speaker F (unidentified): So we are not going to bend the curve on that blue line without some people who are currently working for Rockport Town Government to not work there anymore. Like there's no, we can't go. There's no detail. [1:18:02] Speaker D (unidentified): I looked at some of those budgets. I can't tell you who they're making money and what money's being made. No, we don't have the salary, [1:18:07] Speaker F (unidentified): But what I'm saying, the position data. We went from 30 positions to 44 positions. The only way we bend that curve is those positions, some of those positions go away and they're replaced by contracts or they're replaced by regional services in the way that they were not too long ago. So in terms of like where do we look, the reason I did this is because this tells you where to look. It's EMS, it's the police, it's planning and community development, and it's buildings and grounds. That's where all the staffing increase, and as Marco pointed out, staffing is most of our costs. I agree. The roads are up, but if you look at the increase in roads, it's like $500,000 over five years in a budget that went up $6 million. So the roads, I appreciate you raising the roads and Cross Street got paved. I mean, I get it, but that's a rounding error in terms of the real drivers of costs is roads. I don't, we don't, I mean, I'm with you that we should look at regionalization of roads, and it doesn't make any sense to pave right to the line like this and then turn around and have the time. So there's ways to, that should be an attack too, but I would go where the spending is, which is those big growth areas. [1:19:18] Speaker C (unidentified): And I agree with you, Steve, that we need a reduction in the people, but what we need to do is have the time to have them show us, okay, eliminating them, what is the cost of the contract. And I mean, that's going to be their argument, is we did it because it was less expensive. We need to see the numbers. I agree. I agree. On how they made a decision to hire all these people versus contract. I agree. [1:19:50] Speaker D (unidentified): Right, we've got you sound, I understand what you're saying, I think we're all [1:19:55] Mike Boyle: hearing you jump in we're making the assumption that exercise wasn't done at the time building the grounds was be careful about that because we may We may already have gone through that. This was before my time, so I can't say for sure. [1:20:14] Speaker A (unidentified): I think we're making the assumption that the exercise wasn't done last year, more than it wasn't done originally. [1:20:20] Mike Boyle: Yeah, okay, that's fair. [1:20:22] Speaker A (unidentified): Well, if we're making an assumption, I'm not saying I am. [1:20:25] Mike Boyle: There's a lot, we weren't in the room when some of these decisions were made and all that. [1:20:31] Speaker B (unidentified): I'm kind of nervous about this discussion about eliminating people, employees, because that comes down hard. It comes down really hard, and I'm pretty sure I know that Rockport had trouble hiring people and keeping people. And if we're bringing EMS in and then the next year to taking EMS out, it doesn't doesn't really speak about stability for someone coming here for employment. And I don't I don't know what the answer that is. If that's our main cost, our main place to look for a reduction, but it's doesn't bode well for the town in terms of attracting and keeping employees. Yeah. [1:21:31] Mike Boyle: I think you got to be really careful in this area because you know well. [1:21:37] Speaker D (unidentified): I agree with John. [1:21:40] Speaker F (unidentified): Right, it can't agree you it can't I get it, but when you work in the public sector this is a risk that you take, and it can't be that the ratchet only goes one way and that the number of employees only ever goes up and never goes down. Like you can't you can't run any enterprise. I'll just give you an example. [1:22:02] Mike Boyle: Steve yeah you've made a couple times you made a comment tonight about the planning community development position. You're only talking about expense, and your pink line or whatever it is only talks about expense. It's not I know I. [1:22:16] Speaker F (unidentified): We've talked about it yes we have grants I know five million bucks and we just got another five million bucks of work that now needs to be done. What yes five million, I know, I know. [1:22:27] Mike Boyle: So, you know, you've got to have the whole conversation. [1:22:32] Speaker F (unidentified): So why don't we hire 100 grant writers since they all pay for themselves, and then we could bring in $500 million. [1:22:40] Mike Boyle: Because your pink line would still show expenses when it went up. And you'd be writing about that. [1:22:49] Speaker A (unidentified): Here's the best idea I have right now for this year. The northeast contract that we didn't renew 500,000 253,000 for Rockport it was 900,000 total three Camden was 363 Hope was 120 and Lincolnville was 160. Then they're paying a lot of money for EMS. We've got a great EMS I bet it's even better than northeast EMS. Why sell the service why don't we sell the service? Exactly. Nobody loses their job. I bet, I'm sure there's capacity, because I asked Jason last year if we could answer calls for Hope or Lincolnville. Seems like we can, and that doesn't surprise me because the original study said that if we partnered with all these towns, we'd only need a couple more EMS employees total than we have just in Rockport. There was a middle ground, there wasn't. [1:23:48] Speaker F (unidentified): I don't know what- We had sort of paramedics on the staff, but it wasn't a fully. [1:23:52] Speaker A (unidentified): Right, exactly. So, you know, I don't know what the state of these towns is today. This is just an idea, of course, and I don't know how to suss it out. I'm don't think I'm gonna go walk up to Hopestown office and pitch the idea, but that is, you know, in terms of any possible silver bullets this year, that's the only thing I can come up with. I don't think we're likely to, you know, decrease headcount count this year, no matter what target we set. [1:24:23] Speaker D (unidentified): I agree 100% because I think, Steve, as much as you're saying what you're saying, but my thought is if we ask for a flat budget, nobody gets cut, but we're sending a strong message. It can't be done. Well, you know, we're going to have a chance to vote in a minute, and if you want to vote that way, you can vote that way, but what I'm trying to say to you is you've got a chat over here that's telling you this, if we take this and send this back to John tonight and say, John, lug this out and have a conversation with it, I think that's a great start. That's what I'm saying. You're not going to recreate the wheel and redo things altogether. And we're all not going to agree. We've already showed that. We're not going to agree. Okay? So we're at least here. We've got a quorum. We've got a good discussion going on we have a lot of good input one of the things I want to bring up here which was brought up to me by John is if we spent this much time over the school budget sitting at their budget for a little while that might be a few pennies to save too but my point is no we're not here to talk about that we're here to talk about this stuff and recommend us to that type of stuff out to the public as well i mean i think there's so many great ideas that we can do that send in the message flatline get backwards you know our town employees we get the best buildings in the world but without them we're no good without them we're no good it's the brand new school over there my kids went to it i said you got a great school but if you don't put people in it you got nothing so we still need to go back to these new employees over [1:26:09] Speaker C (unidentified): the last five years we need to go through and look at contract versus we believe way that you're gonna at least come close and say we can eliminate yeah [1:26:18] Speaker D (unidentified): On our payroll, we need to check those and I think we need job descriptions. I think we need to know, you know, what we're talking about and I think like you guys said, maybe it's the EMS that we study with the idea of taking this chat and saying okay, we've got this, we know where we're at with a little more hold on buddy you might want a nitro for this one but you might have to add one or two to bring up and start to subsidize what we've got, you know. [1:26:50] Speaker C (unidentified): The only thing I think with the EMS is it's going to be a select board. I mean if you can't get other of other towns interested in working with us, then our discussion here is. [1:26:58] Speaker D (unidentified): It's a perfect time now to talk to them if they're thinking about doing it. Perfect time to bring it to their attention. And I know there was a study. I've had the study put in front of me and I've got it somewhere stacked that it was not recommended for us to all break off on our own, so. [1:27:15] Speaker C (unidentified): Yeah. So John, do you think that can happen? [1:27:19] Mike Boyle: Which part of the question? [1:27:20] Speaker C (unidentified): Can our select board be influential enough not to get Camden and other towns around here to just hold on for a minute. Let's think this through with a study or something as far as having more people who use the EMS service. [1:27:35] Mike Boyle: I would love to think that. But what I'm watching unfold is not making that possible. I mean, Camden starting to buy an ambulance. I mean, that's what they're going to have to do to get this license. They're going to have to buy their own ambulance. So why would they be applying for the license if they weren't planning to buy an ambulance? So I don't know where this is going, quite honestly. It doesn't make any sense to me. [1:28:04] Speaker C (unidentified): If we ever challenge Jason to come up with a plan for him to sell his services to other times. [1:28:10] Mike Boyle: Well, you were in the meetings we had with Jason last year, right? [1:28:13] Speaker C (unidentified): Yep. He does whatever the select board tells him to do. But, I mean, do you think there's any chance? There was quite a few questions but I'm saying there's any opportunity that Jason is saying okay we want you to be a salesperson for this town you come up with a plan a program how you could service Lincolnville Hope Camden and so forth and if we could go to them and said here's what it would cost you use the service we're going to give you why can't well it's a Jason put together a plan that we could try to sell to other towns is what I'm saying it should be. [1:28:47] Speaker D (unidentified): There should be two representatives. I believe it should be John Duke and Jason. John Duke's representing our town, he's in, he's representing our employees, and he should go to bat and say, hey, we've obviously made the cut over here to make this in West Rockport, and we've got the backup station in Rockport. We'd like to share that with you guys, but to sustain it, go out, meet with the, with their town leaders, and say this. I think you, am I understanding, you're about two hours too late, but I don't know if it's possible. [1:29:20] Speaker C (unidentified): My understanding, John, was that the Select Board wanted an EMS service put together. They gave responsibility to Jason to say, you develop what we need to do to come up with an EMS service. [1:29:31] Mike Boyle: Is that correct? Yeah. And it was all very well documented. I can send you the- [1:29:35] Speaker C (unidentified): But he was the one that really came to the Select Board and said, here's what we need? [1:29:39] Mike Boyle: Yeah. Yeah, and what Jason is building, there's a sort of a minimum amount of staff and a minimum amount of coverage you need in order to get the license to operate. And he met that threshold. That's how he took his marching orders. You can't go halfway into an EMS department. [1:30:05] Speaker C (unidentified): I understand that. What I keep thinking is that if he could go to Camden and say, we'll charge you $350,000 a year to cover your EMS services and so forth, and have them on that board over there start thinking, we're going to spend maybe a million. What do we think about paying $350,000 to Rockport to have a regional service? [1:30:27] Mike Boyle: Sounds like a totally logical conversation to me. [1:30:30] Speaker C (unidentified): But it needs to somehow get generated. [1:30:33] Mike Boyle: Yeah, there's a lot of variables in that. It's not as straightforward. [1:30:39] Speaker C (unidentified): Forward, but I mean, Jason would be the guy to say, here's the number of personnel we need, here's number, here's what we need to operate a regional [1:30:47] Mike Boyle: service. Yeah, to me, I don't know, quite honestly, I don't understand why it hasn't been, you know, more carefully pursued, but we need to be the sales [1:30:59] Speaker D (unidentified): people. I think, I bet nobody's thought of it. I'm sure people have, plenty of people thought of it. I just don't understand why I left that open. Yeah, well, and I think Camden's [1:31:12] Speaker A (unidentified): obviously is already the biggest fish here, and it would be in a, you know, the most valuable partner if they're willing to partner with us, but I don't think Hope's like looking to buy their own ambulance. You know, we have all the statistics, how many people we're serving, how many [1:31:26] Speaker C (unidentified): Of our actual ambulance calls for emergencies is very few. We're doing all this other transporting of people, and if you had the numbers that Camden has, the same situation, you could put the whole package together and say EMS for emergencies is really a small number, and it's all the rest of it that you need to provide the service for. [1:31:45] Speaker D (unidentified): My question, Bill, is the reverse of what you're saying is tell us why it won't work. [1:31:52] Speaker C (unidentified): Yeah, but then you're putting it on somebody else. No,, no. [1:31:55] Speaker D (unidentified): I'm just saying tell us why it won't work. Who are you talking to? I'm talking to the leaders of these departments. Tell us why it won't work Jason. Tell us why it won't work and the same that's what I'm saying and Jason tell us why it won't work again do you remember the [1:32:22] Mike Boyle: last year's meeting with Jason and I asked them those questions about going to warren going to i know what did he answer this is not what i was told to do right no what do you [1:32:35] Speaker D (unidentified): say it's okay we don't need to go back let's go forward let's go watch the recording it's mostly [1:32:41] Speaker F (unidentified): denise defending the decision that had already been made let's go forward because i totally [1:32:46] Speaker D (unidentified): respect what you're saying but let's go forward let's tell us why it won't work because that's what we need to know is why it won't work. [1:32:55] Speaker F (unidentified): I'd be content to look on Rockport's Facebook page and see some type of public announcement that Rockport is going to assume regional leadership of this discussion. Lincolnville is doing it. Camden is doing it. And I do appreciate that there's back-channel discussions. I'm sure there are lots of discussions and things, staff level. and i get it but what i do not for a select board leadership that has adopted goals around this and has got a task force on it and the rest of it i just do not see a public facing commitment to taking this on i don't i they're struggling to get the task force together in part i have to think because i don't know i don't know what the task force is supposed to do and i don't think it's been a company and even if there is a clear goal for which i assume there is it has not been accompanied by any kind of public letter statement press conference like does this is this regional effort important to the town or not because god again god bless the lincolnville select board they're like how about we just pick up the phone and start inviting these other towns to have some discussions they've they have assumed the regional leadership that we should have assumed well in [1:34:20] Mike Boyle: The goals, Steve and I'll take credit for this, that one of the goals is to have a multi-town meeting by February 15th, 2027. Good. On what subject? On regionalization, on regional collaboration. Thank you, John. So it's in the goals. Okay, it's as hard as I could get it to be. It's a little late in the [1:34:42] Speaker F (unidentified): the budget process, but well, I'll take it. I understand it's a baby step shot. I think, I think [1:34:47] Mike Boyle: i think we need to you know there it's worth taking a look at these goals we just okay there's 14 of them okay and before you know you write everybody off take a look i'm not writing [1:34:59] Speaker D (unidentified): everybody off, all right, so no, but I think it's a good time. You guys are meeting next week, John. I think it's a good time. One of the topics that I'd like to see you take to them is somebody please go to the town of Camden, to two representatives, to go to the town of Camden and say, hey, you know what, let's. [1:35:18] Mike Boyle: TODD BANDUCCI- Well, I think we should take a moment and just go tonight or tomorrow, watch the replay of the meeting at Camden. There's something going on there that may impact everything. And Camden's the biggest player in the mix. So it's not like we can't do anything without them. But that, you know, it would sure be nice to do it together. You know, I agree, but my point is [1:35:45] Speaker D (unidentified): they need to know that there's a support right here that says hey this could work yeah this could work you know what if nobody else will step up and say it i 'm asking you why it won't work yeah don't tell me tell me why it won't work steve i would just be a little bit [1:36:04] Speaker C (unidentified): hesitant about declaring that we're going to be the regional. Well, you can't [1:36:09] Speaker F (unidentified): just a clear, right, you can't just declare it. There's a sensitivity between [1:36:12] Speaker C (unidentified): these two towns and their boards for us to go out after we know they're going after this to say we are not going to be the charge of the regionalization of [1:36:20] Speaker F (unidentified): this. Well, I was going to go one time with you. I wouldn't, I wouldn't put it that way. Yeah, I don't say there's an opportunity for smart leadership here to acknowledge that our combined communities cannot endure this. And we have to think differently. [1:36:37] Speaker D (unidentified): Jeez, you've done much better with that. [1:36:39] Speaker F (unidentified): Well, I went back and forth with the former. [1:36:43] Speaker D (unidentified): You did good. I lightened it up a little bit. Because I'm pretty sure I've seen things going around here. Let's summarize it a little bit so we can move through the rest of the agenda. [1:36:56] Speaker C (unidentified): What else do we have on the agenda? [1:36:58] Speaker D (unidentified): I want to first, I want to go back and make a motion to put the budget goals on hold for next month. So moved, second. Okay, all in favor, aye. Okay, request changes for FY 26 budget documents and supporting materials. Again, I'd like to make a motion that we'll be asking for more detail and overtime was one that we wanted just for an example. Otherwise, if we could get a layout of overtime just for one example for the month for the police department, just because we need to get a feeling for what is. [Speaker F (unidentified): Can I separate?] I'm open, I'm open. [1:37:45] Speaker F (unidentified): Well, I just, so I read this as requested changes to the budget book that will be given to us in March. Yeah, so I think I would suggest, given that we're missing members of the committee as well, that we start a running list that's kept that Walker can keep for us on SharePoint or wherever, and when we get to the next meeting we can look at that, we have whatever it is, there are four different things that we talked about tonight, it would be great to have that, we can look at it, people can add to it, and then I think we should set the goal that by the end of the next meeting we finalize that and get it to John so that he can talk to the team about all right, what are the things, okay, that they want to see, because he's gonna start building, they're gonna start building the budget [1:38:31] Speaker D (unidentified): book over the winter, so how would you like to make that motion, I don't know [1:38:36] Speaker A (unidentified): that, I mean, so I'll, I just started a document, yeah, I don't think we need a motion, I think I can, I've got overtime broken out, okay, what was there anything else we mentioned that we'd like to, I mean, I know part, I would like to see what the new KPIs are, but I suppose that's going to be too late. [1:38:51] Speaker C (unidentified): She said October was her- Is that right? [1:38:54] Mike Boyle: She said- Yeah, no, she's coming along on them. I haven't seen them either, Walker. I'm getting as anxious as you are. [1:38:59] Speaker A (unidentified): Yeah, because that will answer a lot of my questions about what else I'd like to say. Yeah, that's a good point. [1:39:04] Mike Boyle: Just a little aside, overtime with the police, we will experience some savings on overtime because we've just been, We've agreed with Camden on our late-night shift, so there is some modest overtime savings that we're going to realize. So that's another, you know, it's a baby step in terms of getting the two police departments to work together. But, again, we had them at the last, no, two select board meetings ago that we announced this. [1:39:38] Speaker F (unidentified): Right, but you've just illustrated by endless frustration, which is we added a seventh police position because we had so much overtime. [1:39:46] Speaker C (unidentified): We never added it, did we, John? [1:39:48] Mike Boyle: No, we haven't filled it. No. Right. [1:39:50] Speaker F (unidentified): So I just, it keeps seeming like we've addressed overtime, we've addressed overtime, we have the sheriff, but it never seems to go away and we don't eliminate any position. We added a position on the promise that it would solve our overtime issue, which it has not solved. [1:40:07] Mike Boyle: Well, we lost the interim police chief along the way, and that wasn't anticipated. [1:40:14] Speaker F (unidentified): I could have anticipated it for you. Not that specific position, but I've made the argument two years ago that as long as we decide we have to maintain our own police force, we'll constantly deal with this kind of staff turnover. [1:40:26] Mike Boyle: Well, what happened there is not, well, anyway, I can't talk about it. [1:40:31] Speaker D (unidentified): We're going to move on that one? [1:40:35] Speaker A (unidentified): So all I'll just I mean the list right now isn't really I don't think an item of one's a list but I think I will send something around before the next meeting with that's a list and we should be if anybody has changes we should come to the meeting with that which changes yeah we can put them in we have a working on the during the meeting and approve it as a committee at the end yeah. [1:40:59] Speaker D (unidentified): So I'd like to say that for B, we'll have a follow-up as well coming from Walker for the committee. This is for you to take back for the board and for the town manager. I want my agendas to have something for answers for them. That's what I'm looking for, gang. You see what I'm saying? So that way there they can say, well, did they do anything with that? Well, officially, yes. Yes, we've got more coming, and we'll include them with the information. So major budget cost drivers and alternatives, mine's going to be I'm going to ask the select board to ask the town manager and the leader of the EMS, the fire department, to step up and meet with all of the ones that you had on your chart, all of them, and look for the solution with all those towns that we just talked about. [1:41:59] Speaker C (unidentified): I'm not sure I understand what the request is. [1:42:01] Speaker D (unidentified): I'm going to ask that Jason and John go meet with each town, ask for a meeting with each town, and talk about EMS and how we could be of assistance to them, seeing that we've already got the capital investment part of it done. And for very little bit of money we could add to and help and make everybody safer and make everybody have a better service and ask them to go meet with. [1:42:34] Speaker C (unidentified): These times, all due respect, I just, I'm not sure it's the Budget Committee's [1:42:40] Speaker D (unidentified): place to tell the select board, so let them tell me that. Well, okay, I'm just [1:42:45] Speaker C (unidentified): not comfortable and having us tell the select board that they're going to have [1:42:50] Speaker D (unidentified): two people they go to each one. It's a recommendation, that's all we do here is make recommendations. They don't have to do anything with it. We do here though, you know, we, they can look at this whole thing and say, you know what, those guys [1:43:02] Mike Boyle: I don't know what they were doing, but it doesn't fit. I think what I think Bill's point is, don't, don't get so specific that you're starting to allocate staff time and that sort of thing, you know, I think the sentiment is to set up a town to town meeting and suss out, you know, how we could do something together with EMS that we currently aren't doing. Something to that effect. Isn't that what I said? [1:43:28] Speaker C (unidentified): I would rather add back to what I said before, is for John to go to Jason and say, we want you to sell your services to the surrounding towns. Come up with a plan on how you're going to sell them on the service. That's what I'd rather see. [1:43:45] Speaker D (unidentified): DAVID BURRAGE- I understand that, but I'll tell you, Bill, I have a problem with that, because I don't think it's fair to Jason. And I don't think it's fair to send Jason out there without the support of the town manager, which is being supported by the select board. BILLY RADERMANN- That's what I'm saying. [1:44:02] Speaker C (unidentified): I would say we're recommending asking John Duke, OK? to ask Jason to put together a plan for how he would sell EIS. [1:44:10] Speaker D (unidentified): Yeah, but I think when they get ready to go sell it, I think there should be, he shouldn't have to do it by himself. [1:44:18] Speaker A (unidentified): No, but I don't think that's our decision. I don't think we need to make that decision. [1:44:21] Speaker D (unidentified): But I just want to make it clear that he shouldn't have to do it by himself. That's not what his job description says. I can assure you that. [1:44:28] Speaker F (unidentified): We can be even higher level than that and say the sentiment of the budget committee is we think that there's an opportunity here, we see this as a, the major cost driver, we think there's an opportunity here and we would, again beating the drum here, but we welcome leadership from John to take some affirmative action to start engaging these other towns working with Jason to figure out how to do that. You're right, Jason needs to be at the table, but you know there 's a moment here where some, again some regional leadership, some, you know, let's [1:45:01] Speaker D (unidentified): So that would be our major budget cost driver at this point tonight. That's where I'm at is C on the agenda. Chair Greg Musil:" Yeah. [1:45:10] Speaker F (unidentified): I think we're talking about can we, in terms of what can we do as a committee, as a committee we can give John Duke a gentle nudge and say, we're looking very seriously at this. We're talking about all kinds of things, including bringing people in here that were part of the original planning of this. We would love to see him take some steps here to engage these, you know, we'd like, and again, I understand there may be back channel discussions, but it does feel like there's movement here, and we just hope that, you know, they, he's got a green light from us, right, to go, we're supportive on this, that's, that's what [1:45:45] Speaker G (unidentified): we think there's a lot of opportunity here to make some effort. Yeah, I hundred [1:45:50] Speaker D (unidentified): percent we're supportive of that, you know, we're supportive of the back channel stuff going on, enough so that we're saying, hey, here it is, you know, that this is, this is what we're supporting. Okay, you've got that one, John, you need, you need us to review, I think I got the general idea, EMS cost revenue, I think that's already talked about, budget committees charge under the town charter, I'm gonna just suggest that we table it, table it till further notice, all in favor, did I get a second, all in favor Okay, open discuss, and we lost our public. Who it was, Bob, you can thoughts. What's the singular of public? Yeah, what's all yours? Terry has something, I'll go Terry and I'll come back with you, Bob, go [1:46:54] Speaker B (unidentified): ahead, I just want to understand, have we lost this idea about, or have we tabled this, we're coming back about getting the budget to coming back, okay, we've got to come figure out [1:47:07] Speaker F (unidentified): so we haven't been, I think we want to explore, like to build, like we've got to come back with, like we think the way you can get there is by looking at the, okay, good, Bob [1:47:19] Speaker D (unidentified): seriously, you have thoughts, because we relish your thoughts, okay, all right, okay [1:47:32] Speaker G (unidentified): public comment at the beginning of this meeting, yeah, do we need to decide what [1:47:36] Speaker A (unidentified): that next meeting is to have, we, I think they set it up already, but what we're going to discuss, oh, I [1:47:44] Speaker D (unidentified): think we're going to come back, we to the, to the budget goals on the next meeting, yeah, we're going to come back to the request [1:47:51] Speaker A (unidentified): of the information, and do we want to talk, go into detail on EMS, or I mean, we've talked about bringing outside people in, is that next meeting a good time for that, or any of these other items, I think it just as an assignment [1:48:08] Mike Boyle: For the group watch the Camden meeting. Yeah, good. I again, I don't know how long it's gonna go. I'm gonna guess it's gonna be quite a conversation, but you [1:48:18] Speaker C (unidentified): know, I think it's premature to bring people, my opinion, of us into, we have our plan, yeah, what we want to do specifically, and then we could decide [1:48:27] Mike Boyle: whether that's something. So the next meeting is on the calendar of the town for November 3rd for the budget committee, which is a week before the select board meeting. I think that was the original plan was to try to get in [1:48:43] Speaker D (unidentified): yeah, I'll try to get guys, I really seriously, I got this nice little iPad that doesn't work great for me, but I'll try. Walker's done great. We'll try to get the minutes out when Walker gets them ready with the agenda and get them out plenty of time, not five days ahead. We'll try to get them out a couple weeks. Is that reasonable you think? Sure. Yeah. Even a week. I mean as long as we know beforehand. [1:49:08] Speaker A (unidentified): I just type it into my little AI project. [1:49:12] Speaker C (unidentified): So in our current minutes we're gonna say that November 3rd is our next meeting at 6 o'clock? Yes. Okay. Yeah. That's a, that's election day, by the way. [1:49:23] Speaker B (unidentified): It is election day. [1:49:25] Speaker D (unidentified): Oh, that's not going to work then. Yeah, I don't think that Megan set that up that way. We'll probably get back to Megan and ask her to change it for us then. [1:49:33] Speaker C (unidentified): Thank you, Jeff. Why do we need to change it? [1:49:37] Mike Boyle: It's election night. But, yeah, it is election day, and they vote. Where do we have voting, at the library? The library. [1:49:46] Speaker D (unidentified): I'm not sure what. I guess it's fine with me. [1:49:50] Speaker A (unidentified): other than parking would be a nightmare down here but yeah I've got two spots if I mean if we if [1:49:57] Speaker D (unidentified): if we bumped it the day before or the day after is that opposed to anybody I'm not here on the [1:50:03] Speaker C (unidentified): second that's Monday how about the fourth I'm here but I'm just staying again why not on election night [1:50:11] Speaker D (unidentified): to be honest with you yeah there's been three people light on attendance I just really want no reason for them not to come. I'm hoping they'll all come. I'm hoping that it doesn't just become the quorum that we had tonight. I'm hoping a couple more can come. It could be a draw. [1:50:38] Speaker A (unidentified): They could come vote and to a budget committee meeting. We're on for November 3rd. [1:50:44] Speaker D (unidentified): No, I'm fine with it. [1:50:45] Speaker G (unidentified): It might be worth you sending a note [1:50:49] Speaker F (unidentified): to the full committee and saying just so you know this is on the calendar for here. If you feel as well that's going to be a big you know problem to get to, we can revisit as a committee and reschedule. Otherwise we're our inclination is to keep on keeping on. People might be going to parties that [1:51:07] Speaker D (unidentified): night. Yeah election parties. Yeah I'll send a gentle reminder out like I did the last one. And then the other thing, I hope you guys like the little handout that I sent out and please do your own. I want to thank John. You've got quite a lot of pages in here. Thank you. It's very helpful. I've got some that I've dropped out somewhere that I'll put in for my next little handout, just more information for us to have. [1:51:52] Mike Boyle: Just again, a reminder on open meeting laws, everybody, you can't express opinions and emails and stuff you know it's you got a got a respect that's very helpful. Yeah so pay attention to the document I gave you kind of guide you. It's it's awkward it's you know sometimes you're like it would be so much more efficient to just do it that way but that's I didn't write the law that's just the way it goes the [1:52:23] Speaker C (unidentified): chairman are you thank you move to adjourn the meeting I'll just write it [1:52:26] Speaker D (unidentified): can we second all in favor john thank you i really sincerely think that you're not our punching bag buddy we'd like you thank you all