4.7.2022 Special Joint Meeting of The Fall River City Council & School Committee

the joint meeting of the city council and school committee will now come to order madam clerk counselors kadeem here sarah here dion here kilby here lee here here here herrera here proposal here and president la liberty lebeau here the school committee would like to call their meeting to order this april 7th meeting school

what everybody in the chamber please rise for a moment of silent prayer

and remain standing for a salute to the flag

the school committee have citizens input we have one good afternoon members of the school committee and the fall river city council today is the joint meeting between the city council and school committee and today's meeting is supposed to be regarding the finances of our city and school department i first want to speak on the school department side the school committee gave away their

authority to appropriate funds in line items the school committee can only approve the whole budget or disapprove the whole budget if you agree with 70 percent of the fall of the fy 23 budget however if a school committee member moves to propose some changes they cannot do so the last school committee voted away their ability to make allocations and changes in the budget mr aguiar recently made a

motion to allow the school committee to have back their power to line item authority and the rest of the school committee didn't even second the motion or even vote on the fair proposal where is the transparency where is the accountability the school committee and the city council should deny any school committee budget until they allow back their own line item authority the taxpayers of this community deserve

nothing less now on to the city side of the budget mr mayor where is your budget why hasn't it been released yet i believe it is important for members of the community to know that the coogan administration wants to raise water rates raise the sewer rates raise property taxes all the way to two and a half percent and include a debt exclusion for durfee this administration also wants a second

debt exclusion for diamond i would like to see in my wish list for the new budget answers to the arpa situation the mayor is being secretive about the budgeted opera funds he is holding non-public secretive opera meeting committee meetings to quote-unquote approve the opera allocations the mayor's office told me a lie on january thirteenth twenty twenty two the mayor's office told me in writing that

bcedc would report all of the small business opera allocations they administered to the city they told me the allocations would be public records i made a public records request with the city clerk's office and the response i received yesterday was that the records are held with ken fiola the city does not have the records the mayor's office referred me to mr faiola i am now expected to ask a private organization

for public records that's ridiculous i still did so and mr fiola has not gotten back to me he has no obligation to bcedc is not a public organization the city has no record on what businesses have received opera funds this is secretive the mayor doesn't want the public to see where the opera funds are going again i believe the city has lied to we have a person on the sixth floor who

is being controlled i don't think he knows how to make decisions for himself he shows absolutely no leadership and always refers questions and comments he allows to continue to the taxpayer dollar and i find it really embarrassing that school committee and city council members cuddle up to him for votes and support when we should be holding the administration accountable no one wants to hold him accountable

anymore like we did last year i will continue to hold him accountable as a private citizen it is the job of our elected officials to hold the administration accountable and i don't think we are living up to that thank you very much colin dyas think further pursuant to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting through any medium

attendees are therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible madam clerk is there any citizens input for the council no matter thank you as this is a joint meeting called by the mayor for the charter mayor coogan if you have any opening remarks

okay thank you everybody madam president members of the honorable council and school committee and superintendent ponce the annual joint budget meeting of the city council on the school committee is an opportunity to review the fiscal and financial condition of the city and to assist in developing a coordinated budget the budget being proposed here today reflects the needs of our various

departments to make certain that we can provide high quality services to the residents of fall river the final budget will be crafted with collaboration and feedback from our financial team department heads members of the city council and school committee and of course the school administration in making certain that we have a balanced budget we worked with our federal delegation specifically

congressman jake archenclaws to increase the lost revenue provisions in the opera funding bill to 10 million dollars this money is available to use for any city traditional spending in addition we still have 1.6 million in free cash and 7.2 million dollars in our stabilization fund we have future expected increases potentially in revenue from additional sources such as our business trash

savings and health insurance new growth potential additional state aid and we'll be working a small portion of our school transportation bill and one part of the plan that we'll be presenting tonight is to reduce the derpy debt exclusion by 2.2 million using opera funds to offset half of the increase for our residential and commercial rate payers i know it's a small decrease but it's money back in

their pockets at this time as we continue to plan for the use of the city's opera funding as well additional funding may be coming down from the state and county and we are guided by one singular vision to ensure that our residents receive the services they need that our students receive a quality education our streets are safe and that fall river continues to be an inviting place for

businesses and young entrepreneurs and old alike fall river is currently seeing a recovery from the covert 19 pandemic and decades of financial strains from our housing market to the industrial park to our growing waterfront district we are seeking renewed investment and excitement in fall river the pandemic hardly slowed the economic growth that we are seeing today and the budget

message we are presenting today reflects the positive nature of fall river's economic future i look forward to working with my colleagues on the city council and school committee to ensure that we use this year's financial plan to better the lives of our families our children our seniors our veterans and all of the residents in fall river as always we will work with the goal of making fall

river a safer better and more livable community for all thank you guys very much i'd like to turn it over to eddie i capone so he can present our powerpoint it's not long and it's pretty succinct thank

no no it's all right you can they can i i'd like to see the city first yeah i thought that's what first that's why i want yeah see what it looks like relaxation i thought we were first that's what i thought yeah i'm looking at the screen that's why i said

good i thought i was going to do the that's great can we have those over here oh sure i'll give them go ahead you can start oh thank you do both bodies have both presentations maybe that's what those were made for maybe the school committee thank you yes

yes

all set good evening folks uh remind you my name is eddie capone i'm a financial consultant to the city uh waiting for our new finance team to uh to join us in a couple of weeks uh looking forward to it and uh but in the meantime we'll keep moving uh moving forward this presentation is brief right to the point because you know by charter you will see the budget along with the uh capital uh

improvement requests you've already seen the plan uh you'll see it at the proper time and will you know it'll be presented to you uh right now the budget is still a work it will work in progress there's a little more work to do on it to finalize you know the needs of the departments um the city does have a few new department heads and you know you need to give a little

bit of time and we're we're pretty much on target as far as uh you know meeting the deadline to submit the budget so i'm a little concerned about one of the comments i heard about the budget getting the budget i mean you're going to get it all you know along with when you when you're supposed to so a little concerning but but anyways uh already this is a basically a

brief review and i'll go over with you right now uh the assumptions in here we're going to give you some budget assumptions projected revenue and projected expenditures as we know as of today you know right now uh fiscal uh 23 budget estimates are just over 325 million dollars for revenues and exp and expenses we will obviously balance with the revenues this represents approximately at this point a 6.8

increase over fiscal 22. uh most of the general government uh line items are not finalized yet they will be within the next week or so and you know then the budget will uh will come down will be prepared in the format that you uh that you've seen it in i i would like to see a little streamlining of the budget there's a lot of things in there to me that are a lot of extra work i

mean the information is available uh along with the budget in a lot of different places but anyways we'll uh we'll talk about that when you see it the budget does include the debt exclusion for the durfee high school totaling 2.2 million 250 000 as voted by the taxpayers and that obviously as you all know that's that's in addition to prop two and a half increase and uh and the new growth of the city

other revenue sources will include the revenue loss due to the pandemic and they will be looked at as an authorized use of funds as outlined in the american uh rescue plan act and that you know the concentration there will be to review and present the mayor with items that we think can be uh uh paid for uh one-time expenses and possibly some you know other needs uh it includes an eight approximately an

18 increase in school revenues uh the city was fortunate this year along with all of the other gateway communities uh to receive a significant increase in chapter 70 revenues and that's that's a big i mean that's one of the largest increases i've seen in years new guidelines for the u.s treasury have been established allowing the city more flexibility over the opera funds salaries and wages may include

filling vacancies that were eliminated in the 21 budget fiscal 21 budget and unfilled in fiscal 22 due to the many uncertainties that were arrived and during the pandemic in in the heavy yokovic periods expenses will include the operating needs of the departments to provide the citizens obviously with the best services possible the budget will include funding school operations at 100 of net school spending

negotiations between the city administration and collective bargaining units are ongoing and those are in progress right now being negotiated and we are trying to make some provisions so that we're not blindsided with the with the funding mechanisms that will be needed the city will continue to review all capital items on an ongoing basis to evaluate which one-time purchases may qualify for the use of opera funds

the the the projected revenue of the city if you've seen that format before and uh we'll be on you'll see it again uh basically you can see that if you go down uh the state aid general government net of assessments education you'll see with that that reflects the uh the biggest increase in chapter 70 funds real estate you'll see the increase there of approximately 7 million that includes the debt exclusion

prop 2 and a half and a very conservative estimate on new growth at this point in time just to remind the council for fiscal 22 the city had the benefit of using the 18-month transitional period for new growth and if you need me to kind of just explain that a little bit the assessment date in the city is usually january 1st fall river took advantage and transitioned it and used an 18-month period and brought the

assessment law date in line with july 1 july 1st what that means is is that the rape the city was able to take advantage and pick up some six months worth of additional uh estimated growth during the fiscal 22 budget everything else remains the same as far as you know the legality of names not changing you know on january 1st it just means that all of the permitting and new construction was able to be

picked up and then this year we're right back on a cycle so the new growth can still be accounted for as we go right through june 30th of 22. so it makes it a little problematic to come up with a more uh accurate you know new growth number at this period of time but uh so anyways that's that's basically what you did to get to where you are at today

back to a to a 12-month cycle on new growth uh local receipts try to keep them as conservative and as flat as possible made a little adjustment here and there up and down um there are some new opportunities obviously as you're aware in the marijuana industry um also in the you've heard some information about the commercial starting of a commercial revenue stream in the uh trash uh

cost area which is a significant number overall for the city and then you come down and basically what i've done is i've eliminated the uh the 2.9 million that was used under the rehire provision in the opera fund so far for fiscal 23. the trick not the trick the plan is the mayor wants to get the city back on a on a on a process where the use of one-time money

starts to you know you start to get under control and not continue to use one-time money and it's the gateway cities i mean they're all in the same boat new bedford in fall river uh we're in a great time right now with these opera funds that have come down and of course school funds of ursa funds i mean i haven't seen uh expenditure you know federal money come down like this since

i'm that old since the days of revenue sharing and uh long before uh you know the years ago i don't remember some of you remember that but you know there were periods over the years that that happened some communities used all that money for uh uh operating expenses and that caused a lot of problems either later uh don't look at me when you say no i'm not no i'm not looking at you and

i'm not looking at kevin either because i know you're not old enough for that and sean i know he's not old enough for that i was just thinking of the one-time money comment but that's yeah right they've done it before it doesn't make sense but yeah i know they've done it before um so you can see and right now the plan is not to take any money out of the stabilization fund to fund

uh capital that needs to really be reviewed because i think it's important that the city protects its reserves in total water and sewer enterprise funds those budgets have already been submitted to you the only thing we need to do there is we need to just do a little fine-tuning on their uh indirect costs but that'll that'll that's not an issue it's up to you i mean i can keep going

and i'll be glad to answer questions after counseling c3 council vice president depends on president what's your preference i can wait until he finishes his comments okay all right so next slide we do have an issue that i haven't seen yet it's being we've been charging funds some funds to fema for reimbursement you know over expenditure and snow and ice i need to see what the what the city's flow is going to be on

uh uh getting reimbursements on some of those accounts in the general government area and this is uh probably its percentages on the right can be a little bit confusing because there's been a redefinition in some areas of of the use of things of course retirement is one of your biggest uh increases generally the city's done a great job in the uh health insurance area and they've they've actually made some

major headway in uh in saving some money if you go down the list and you look administrative services uh you're seeing an increase like 10 percent it's sort of misleading because there are some positions that have been uh you know filled you know backfilled and uh you know to get us ready to where we're gonna be in uh in 23 that have not been filled in 21 and 22 but time has come with some of

them obviously have to be filled you know to maintain a level of service for the city and as you go down the list you'll see that uh it shows about a seven percent increase and that is in the area of being constantly reviewed and that'll be finalized very shortly that's about it in their enterprise funds and that ends up bringing your uh with with the enterprise funds you're in that 317.3 million dollar range

thank you sheet three are you still going yeah i just got a couple more brief slides city stabilization and free cash presently is as the mayor uh reported out in his general market remarks uh it's about eight million seven hundred and ninety one thousand uh mike if you look at that as a percentage of the of the 323 million dollar approximately at this point the general fund you're looking at 2.7

you know do a department of revenue gfoa which is a finance association that i belong to for many years they're recommending a much larger obviously reserve i mean if this city could get somewhere in that middle range 15 in that range i think the city would be doing well and so that's basically that slide water and sewer they have their enterprise funds they're revenue driven as you all know uh they they've taken on

some new you know some new policies they're maintaining uh retained earnings and uh and uh some free cash and i think they're using it appropriately without uh over building surpluses that's it that's last one that's the last that's the last slide thank you counselor at c3 council vice president what was the last comment you made about over billing is that what you said no i said the revenue the the water and

sewer enterprise funds are actually you know revenue driven water and great pace and uh it's important that they do maintain certain reserves you know almost on a policy level i did read some comments and i think i'm not sure i think they came from council like the name and some of that strategy makes sense to me and i think when you hear from the when the water uh the water director superintendent yeah i'm not

a director when he presents his budget he'll he'll go over that you know the status of the capital water plans and sewer and and where they stand because uh they are proposing a small and i think it's small uh water and sewer uh increase but i think that's important that as you go along rather than spiking large rate increases with the with water and sewer and i don't want to get too far ahead of

myself but he'll he'll be presenting those budgets and so what percentage in terms of a buffer would you recommend you mean for the city no for water and sewer i i think they're aware they need to be i think if you look at their budgets you'll see and when he explains the position to you where they're at i think you'll see they're where they need one of the most important things about

retained earnings which is like a a per permanent reserve fund in their water enterprises you always got to make sure that you have money for any large unexpected capital expenditures and if you ever didn't need to rate stabilization that you've got those reserves that you really can you know count on right i only have a couple of comments i guess right now so my first comment would be on the uh

i guess you'd call it page three budget assumptions it kind of bothers me that opera funding is referred to as revenue opera funding definitely is not revenue know the category is called other other revenue sources it's it's it's just a term to define grant money uh you know things that you could uh you know appropriate from or or charge money to yeah um i think it broke out in its own

category would make me feel better but the one-time funding doesn't uh appeal to me either no it is it is it it's usually identified like last year when the budget used uh some opera funds under the recovery i forget the name exactly rehire rehire provision it was spelled out separately and you mentioned grants i know that has nothing to do with this but because you said it sparked this in my mind

since the cfo left the city have we received any grants so jane dibiasio uh who is our our grant writer has been working with departments throughout the city uh including ems and some of the public safety departments with all sorts of different grants i don't have a record at this point that i can reliably talk to you about with regard to what she's been applying for uh but i know that she is constantly

busy and constantly working on new opportunities including uh council pereira has sent me some amazing things regarding skate parks and the preserve and other things that jane is looking into as we speak okay the reason i ask that question is all grants are supposed to come before the city council for acceptance and expenditure and one of the most important reasons is that some of the grants require matching

funds so if the expenditure isn't approved you can't use the grant because you can't match the expenditure that's true so that's why i'm asking whether any grants have been have come to the city in the in the last few months i don't know of any grants that have been awarded but i know that our uh i know that uh jane is is constantly working on always looking for grants and

a lot of these are really long processes so i'll make a note of that and and if there's anything that uh that i think is important obviously to notify the council about especially if there's anything that happened you know where there was money used and i don't think there has been i'm actually fairly certain there has not been right uh and i don't think there would be that said if we have any grants that we

believe are are forthcoming uh make sure the council's aware of that okay because you know it could have happened before you were put in the position that you're in so okay in terms of the debt exclusion for the high school that's going to be a separate line item on the tax bill for it it's not anymore there's no provision for that at this time on the on that on the city's tax

bill and that's that's highly uncommon i mean that's that's really uncommon i mean you know years ago we used to do a separate tax rate for schools in the city but there won't be a separate line out of them well i find that intriguing because since day one it's always been said that that would be a separate line item on the tax bill because that debt exclusion is specifically and only to pay for the school

um i don't believe that that that that debt exclusion should be included in in the general and what budget where where it was where the question on the ballot was specifically for debt exclusion to pay for the high school yeah and that's that's in the budget i mean it's it's you can't that money is specifically dedicated to pay for uh the half of the uh you know at this point about half of the debt

so the school durfee debt yeah for the high school yeah i mean but it it and then someday when that's paid off it's gone so the so the debt to to pay to build durfee right is in the general taxes going into the general fund just to be paid as part of the operating budget as opposed to handling it as a debt exclusion no the the money that's borrowed for the durfee long-term borrowed money

is included in the city's debt schedule so you're bringing in money to pay for you know pay for that for that uh that debt so i mean okay so how do people know how what their per what their dollar amount is paying towards the school we have to tell them okay and that will happen when you mean when that i mean i mean people have been waiting years to know how much

durfy is going to cost them in additional taxes oh i see oh i'm sorry well again this year um miss dion it's probably about four and a half million so we're going to try to help with half of it but to your point i think um when we get closer to tax time and the budget's completed i think you've got a good idea where we put out what the tax is on the 300 000 single

family what the tax is on a 500 000 family so people know the breakdown i actually have that on my table but we were waiting this is a preliminary budget review but i think you have a good point people have to know and i think that's valid i do okay thank you you and i've been in this for a long time on that debt so i appreciate him from day one from day one all right

thank you i yield for now thank you counselor and seat five council lee thank you for uh the presentation and and and being here today and uh thank you to the school committee as well um so in the in this in the uh initial presentation when when you spoke um i just wanted to get an idea of you said um and and please correct me if i'm wrong you said that the um congressional delegation

was approving 10 million dollars towards traditional city spending is that correct correct um what what does that what does that consist of specifically what would be any general government function meaning like fixing roads anything like that at all any general government okay all right a few exceptions we looked at them today but there are a few maybe four or five but it's nothing that would impact

general government functions and um it came up it just came up in and when this uh council vice president was uh asking you a question about the grants and and honestly i believe we just recently just had a um a committee on environmental affairs and i believe in the middle of that conversation and i don't know the exact timing of it but i believe it was stated in that meeting that twenty thousand dollars from dcr

was granted correct remember do you remember dcr dcr what there was a grant for twenty thousand dollars um to uh parks and i'm so sorry yes it was for the stump removal um i don't know exactly when that came down online that to answer your question council vice president but i do believe twenty thousand 000 was approved in that meet or it was talked about in that meeting so i again i don't know the

timing of it you said over the next over the past few months or so um but it was mentioned in that meeting so whether it happened on before or after you do have a list of stumps they started with 25 but i believe that might have been from last year okay i could be wrong because i don't think they've approved anything this year and we did i remember writing it down

and talking about it but i i don't know if there was an actual timeline as to when it was sure it was stated when it was down the line but just to you know point that question your direction um regarding um regarding arpa in general i know that we as a body here accepted about 35 of 35 of that however there's 70 all together correct now um when are we going to see a plan going

forward for the other half of that is that something that's going to be presented to the council in the future what we have been doing is and again in meeting with certain counselors to ask them what their priorities would be for offer funds we do get some direction on that i think i think everybody should be allowed to weigh in but we get applications as we do our ads people apply for money the committee meets they

decide what's the best way to go today i can confirm that we hired um an opera administrator uh someone i i think is really going to be an asset to the city when you're dealing with this kind of money so our plan going forward is to solicit requests uh i call them good ideas on how the best way to use this money is i think would i think we've put some money into some

very important things in fall river public safety wise we do have two and more requests from our police department for tasers and things that would have been in capital projects but that's how we've been doing it as we go along the biggest amount of money that went out in the first phase was up roughly nine million dollars to water projects and i did talk with the council dion about that and she said

that's a tremendous focus of hers to that end though there's also been an additional round of grants that have just come through we're working on them yesterday we were on a call with senator warren uh there's a lot of earmarks that cities like four river are eligible for which are going to be another series of grants four or five million dollars each we're looking at again more water and sewer

work things that'll make the city a better place to live so so for the other half of this uh are we being presented with accepting it again or is it already the whole thing been accepted and it's coming in different i don't know that's a good question we'll check on it and we'll follow the law okay because i would think that the next time we are in a position to approve or accept

the the grant funding we should know what the plan is going to be going forward this time around um we have there's been a lot of questions as to what as to where this is going and we don't always know what's coming next and i think we need to have an idea of what's coming next when it comes to arpa funding in general um now uh the sanitation recycling conversation is

going to i feel is going to be a big significant increasing conversation as we go forward it always does it always comes up it's been coming up for the past several years um i just wanted to know a couple of things because i know that we can't have this entire discussion tonight but the recycling contract that did assist in reducing some costs that we that we just recently had i believe it was with abc

is there uh is that still a negotiation is that something that we're still looking forward to doing uh because it was it wasn't significant well you know same with that now and you're in the middle of it is that part of the i know there was a page talking about negotiations with uh cba but i wanted to know if there was anything as far a collective bargaining but i didn't know if there was anything as far

as uh with the with the recycling contract because that's a that's a big we ended up getting a big savings from that from that conversation before it was a substantial amount but i don't know of anything going forward right now other than that we do have uh probably another meeting with uh easy coming up shortly um as everyone knows trash prices are going through the roof we've heard numbers of 160 plus

dollars a ton in some areas outside of boston um it's it's something that weighs on the commonwealth not just the river and uh it's going to be on our radar screen for a long time and everybody on this councils one of the things i know that's uh still in uh subcommittee i believe it's still to be talked about is the uh the ordinance on uh composting and i know that we've had past discussions i

know that covered in a handful of other things gotten away and we didn't we kind of wait push it to the side but i believe personally i believe that composting is one of those um things where if we do have a good effort in our city for that it's it's a very low cost but high reward return when it comes to bringing down costs in that area is that has there been any more

discussion on that or any push towards um letting the public know about you know what we're doing in that regard as far as you know composting program i i haven't had any follow-up on that uh counselor lee i'm sorry we did we would work on that but i do remember that was one of your areas that you were concerned about and it was brought down by your office to have that you know ordinance in place

so we'll go back to that yep okay and again i don't see that as an end-all be-all but but every every dollar is going to count at this in this conversation so with that i yield thank you thank you mayor coogan did you say you hired an opera administrator right yes well i shouldn't say that hope she takes the job she'll let us know she let us know but we didn't agree

to anything yet so we use the viewer this is a position that doesn't exist so how are we going about that um in the administrative funding line and opera there's a percent percent they give you i think um eddie and i were looking at new bedfords it was a couple of million dollars they had an administrative cost we're not doing that we're looking for one person to come in obviously work with the counselors and the

administration to uh address opera issues concerns and make sure what we're doing going forward is on point okay but so if the position doesn't exist in the city it needs to be created it's a grant position it's only good for the time the um the grant's available right yeah is it a full-time part-time uh we haven't got to the hours yet we discussed both with the young ladies is there anything further from the council

counselor seat one thank you madam president just a couple of quick questions um so with regard to the opera money in one time monies so i've seen that obviously you reduced from prior 22 um but the slide would suggest that we are using our money in one time monies where would how i guess how much are we anticipating and use of one-time monies it's hard to say at this point because

you know two things going on that there's a lot of uh on the capital plan uh for fiscal 23 i noticed that there was god there was like 16 million dollars worth of bonding requests you know that we were gone and i think when i when i looked through the capital in the individual budgets it was around 1.6 million that would have had to come out of the stab fund

and i'd recommend it to the mayor that we need to slow down a little bit so that we can kind of protect them what about the the operating budget general fund there's nothing i don't think we put anything regular regular no i didn't i didn't put anything in he told me we were keeping it out of there i know that was when you're trying to like continue rehiring is zeroed out revenue losses

zeroed out in your budget but even even the use of the uh two point so that's one time two two point two for the dead exclusion right to offset that that's one time one time so but that's gonna be rolled in right right into so that we would see it somewhere in the oh yeah yeah you'll you actually will see it in the real estate in that number going from

116 to 123. okay you're gonna see it in there all right so when we get a budget we'll we'll see that yeah when you see the budget you'll see the backup where you'll see the calculation for the two and a half percent of the the regrowth and the that exclusion and then in terms of the the slide where um budget assumptions you've got negotiations still going on how many i guess how many unions are

units do we have ongoing with negotiations and have we have we put funding in the operating budget to address those i guess the settlement of those contracts or would you would you be coming back before the council looking to to fund so if you know you reach agreement on a collective broadening agreement are you coming back for approval and funding for those items or so there's a couple questions in there

oh yeah try to take them in order and if i miss one please let me know um with regard to the bargaining units that we are continuing to negotiate with that would include um essentially all of them uh but we are very close on on most uh with regard to our city hall workers and dcm workers those are at different stages but i think we're very close there certainly close to ems i believe police

were also almost there at this point i wouldn't speculate as to what the increases or cost of those would be and you and i both know there's something in ordinance that we would need to show what the total cost of those contracts would be and regardless of whether it's out of ordinance by the time we have a contract that will be something that this council will have the total cost of each of those uh new cbas

all that said the speculated projected cost increase has been part of all of the budget conversations and i will say that we're we're prepared to absorb that increase with the current budget structure and then in terms of i know i forget which one of my colleagues brought up the the trash so i'm just curious as to how we handle the trash for fiscal year 23 in regards to the business pickup i know

we were told back in february prior to february it was it was probably in december or january that uh we would be stopping the business pickup in february of 2022.

so have we have we stopped it and are we projecting the stopping of trash in fy23 there's approximately 225 businesses that that would affect um so the the the balance of businesses in the city either already have contractors for their own pickup the ones that are are receiving or had been receiving the free pickup totals about 225 or so businesses um we were hoping to stop that

free service in february and begin a new program where there was a pay for pickup that was delayed a little bit just in conversations about the best way to do that um so the initial letter to the businesses uh indicating how this is going to work and what the costs are going to be is something that i've just received as an initial draft that i expect and hope that will go out sometime in the next

week to 10 days okay and what's the estimated cost on that that for us to pick up that those businesses um i think that's one of the delays so at this point i wouldn't be comfortable saying that as a for sure thing but i'd be glad to uh circle back with the group that is working on this uh within the next day or two and get the council on numbers okay

but i recalls like 300 grand to 500 000 oh total cost i apologize no no total cost gotcha uh savings the projection is that there's a cost of three to five hundred thousand dollars thank you councillor kilby okay and you say within the next couple weeks my guess is that uh we'll be rolling out the program in the next couple weeks and i believe it'll it'll be fully operational no later than may

but the so the costs that you've appropriated on the general fund include the picking up of that right so any additional so if we get those businesses off we can anticipate some additional savings in fy23 that's true but because of the delay in starting it it may not be as much as we originally hoped okay and then in terms of the uh mentioning of the net school spending uh 100

percent where are we with the prior year net school spendings and um not meeting the i think i think we have one coming down to you got one common team the 1.4 is coming to your next meeting and then i think it's 800 plus 871 000.

that will come probably the meeting after that and then we'll be caught up so we're looking to appropriate monies so not continue it to right now it'll be coming in the next couple of minutes one's already on your agenda for next week i'm pretty sure right the one point right yep so roughly 2.2 million so one four in the eight and that should bring us to the hundred a hundred percent for the end of fiscal

22 which we won't know until the schools file the final report but we'll be we'll be right on target and i've gone over the numbers with kevin he's put his fingerprints on it so we should be all right which kevin kevin amir

i know you did and then in terms of transportation i know transportation has always been a major issue where where do we stand with transportation for the school department well it's an 11 million dollar bill uh and preliminarily i have not i was talking to one of the councils before the meeting last meeting i jumped the gun on something obviously you're mandated to transport kids from k

to six but because we have such an attendance issue in the city of fall river i would never stop transportation for seven to twelve um what we have asked for with uh working with the school department i will have the numbers to the school committee tomorrow because we have a meeting next week is a little relief on some of the unmandated transportation with essa funds for a year or two again

this um this would be monies that would go into our city budget strengthening us long term and again i'm not gonna i'm not gonna not transport kids that's not happening we're gonna do it whatever we have to do but for a couple of years we were looking for a uh some relief and obviously in this time of plenty money both for the city and for the schools i mean i've never

seen a time when the schools are sitting on 80 million dollars it's uh it's substantial it's uh it's great for our students it's great for our families but we were looking for a little relief and we'll do our best to get it for the city i know you worked on it with another angle at one point and i did have a conversation at the mma meeting the other day echoing exactly what you said i said if

you're not going to make it all net school spending eligible can we look at 50 can we look at 30 is there a way to walk a number out it's one of those hot button topics you tried it and um and i'm gonna i'm gonna try it also if there's a way to do it i really do believe in my heart of hearts whatever you have to do to increase it school transportation is a school

function uh the city does it now we're going to continue to do it but at the same time there's nothing wrong with the little relief when you can do it okay i yell for now thank you councilman c2 council camaro thank you mr president um i want to commend you on that comment mr mayor because i think it is important that we continue to transfer the kids even though we're not mandated to do it seven

through 12 so that's that's a good thing and i know that you really do mean it um and this is a great start a great presentation but it's basically a draft the budget portion correct yeah so it doesn't say draft anywhere around here well if you read the bottom of the slide i kind of put the words not finalized all right yeah so i mean i'm just using this only because this way when someone's

saying you know the council has received the budget no it's a draft but if it says draft on it's perfectly clear this is just a draft yeah right and yeah so not finalized yeah i know it's not final we all go back here yeah but it gets i was going to mock and everyone understands what that means it's a work in progress it's just a draft there's all there's still things

that will change yeah i just want to make sure it was perfectly clear so everyone understood that people on their list that price as well they got the budget it was presented to them and it's just a basic draft there will be changes and i'm looking forward to it the rest of it i i commend you guys on what you're doing and it seems to be okay so i'm good a lot of the questions

that were answered were good and doesn't seem a lot of input at this point in time right now so with that thank you madam quick are you thank you anything further from the council counselor in c3 council vice president did anybody not speak yet no one has their hands raised um i would like to touch on that citizens input with the opera funding um for the small businesses arpa funding being tax money

wouldn't you consider that public i i it is public those lists are all over the office i don't know what was said i'm i'm i if i didn't send it down to the clerk there's nothing hidden about those lists i don't know why so there should be no reason for that list and not to be able to be public you can't do that michelle that's really because those names are out there um you

you'll know some of them you won't know others but those are all small businesses that applied and there's no way that we're hiding anything so that's not going to happen and if i have to email you all the list tomorrow i will but i've there's that thing's floating all over the office isn't it yeah i'm sorry counselor well i'll be honest i i i have a copy oh i was going to say it

but i wanted i wanted to i want to verify the fact and see that you agreed that it was public information no doubt so that there's no issue when if when i release that no you'll know in advance i'm going to do that you asked for it right yes i did yeah that's that's not an issue no that that should be public i agree 100 okay i just wanted to clarify that because

better to clarify things and let things be transparent and let them run away sometimes people say things that aren't accurate you know i i i have to go back to the debt exclusion with the high school um i understand what you're saying but i feel like rolling it into the budget makes it more like a two and a half percent override than an actual debt exclusion the definition of a debt exclusion a

debt exclusion is a temporary increase in property taxes outside the limits of proposition two and a half to raise the funds necessary to pay debt service costs for a specific capital project debt exclusion funds may only be used for that specific project so i feel like if you're rolling it into the budget and it's not being taken as a separate uh dollar being put towards the specific project

i i just i'm having a hard time just a point of clarification counseling so it has to be rolled into the operating budget the department of revenue is going to require it as part of your tax rate shouldn't it be a separate line item no i think what i think what you're looking for is is a separate line item on the tax bill so when you get your total tax bill whether it's 6 000 or

you know 10 000 it will say what you would pay for taxes and then you would have a separate line item that would say debt exclusion and then you could monitor the debt exclusion that way but from a mechanism standpoint it's rolling into as part of your tax levy it comes to your tax levy so there's no way to remove it from the general fund so your question what you're looking for

for full transparency has to appear on the tax bill itself right exactly right as a separate line item correct which is the way it was rolled out and the way it was expected correct i mean can we go back to that i mean that's the expectation of the taxpayers is they're going to see it on their tax bills i think it's what counselor dean said i i thought when you

and i did say it it was going to be a separate line but then when we went to dor they said it rolls in but i think it's going to be listed on your total bill as a line with an amount okay okay thank you and then my last question would be uh in terms of the deficit how are we addressing the deficit i mean if we're cutting back on the

amount of opera funding being put into the budget we've obviously had increases um so we know there's going to be a there's a deficit there always is so how do we address any deficits no we're flush okay right now we didn't play in front of no at this point in time yeah i mean last year is very unusual you know things that went on i mean as i reviewed which i

didn't really want to but i reviewed the 22 and i'm still in 22. you know the the implications of transfers that were made and and revenues that had to be used you know trying to take a and and last year the basically you didn't use the debt exclusion but you still had to make payment right you know that was a big that was a big number yeah okay that i yield thank you

thank you anything further from the council i think from the school committee mr aguero thank you thank you so i'm a little confused on a few things here um i always take these meetings as a good opportunity to sit down with the full council full school committee and the administration to discuss where we're at basically the the in essence of the charter it says review of the fiscal and financial

condition of the city revenue and expense forecasts and other relevant information in preparation for the budget so when i read that like if i was to come here today and say am i better off right now than i was an hour ago relative to those questions and i can't honestly say yes as a member of the school committee we as a school committee have not been presented any forecast from the city whatsoever

before this meeting at this meeting we're looking at well we'll look at what we got for budgets we'll we'll do this and that basically kind of telling us what you're going to do for the current budget the real issue that i think we have as a city is a forecast in the future like what are we going to do and what are we going to look at i just had a counselor

ask a question to the folks at the table here are you flush and the answer i got was yes i got head nods yes quality yes but the answer that i i was i'm sitting here watching just listening saying to myself i i can't understand how anybody can say that the city is flush i fully understand that the city has financial difficulties going forward i think everybody does but we sometimes

get amnesia at certain meetings and we forget to do that the point of this meeting is how are we going to be in fall river five years from now ten years from now it it's frustrating for me to sit here because i only get a chance every now and again to talk to you all together because you can't do this uh you know but i'm looking at one item here the line item here says uh

the total budget and it says g-f-o-a and d-o-r which i assume those are some revenue and financial organizations one i i would think you'd be familiar with the department of revenue yep and what does the other one stand for this one's a massachusetts finance association that they're really the gurus of the foreign municipal finance that's what i figured it was like the girls of financial uh information and it says

the dor recommended balance of 10 32 million 383 000 if you scroll up three levels we're at 2.7 percent of the budget i recall sitting here at one of these meetings earlier on where i was suggesting that the school department shouldn't even be part of that because it's a different type of funding but if if we're looking at that to say we're supposed to have 10 we aren't flush i don't care what

anybody over there says we are not flush we are in some serious uh financial issues can we carry it and work together to try to get over it sure but i'm not any better off from what i've received so far to know how are we going to be proceeding over the next five years we we heard about the opera funds for the reduction in fact everybody wants the reduction in taxes everybody would want to

i hear today we're going to go take 2.2 million in opera funds as a reduction but we still haven't done the budget on the city side so those decisions still haven't been met but we're committing to the 2.2 right right off the bat i i question that because how can you say we're going to use 2.2 and the funds to lower that amount if you think that we're maybe in trouble

going forward if we needed to have that revenue i sat at home and watched this council talk about how are you going to fund diamond that's what i heard this council say now i just heard that we're going to take 2.2 million and put it in for opera but we got a debt exclusion that the taxpayers could pay for but we're going to leave that on the table then we're going to wonder how

we're going to pay for diamond later these are the bigger picture things that i was expecting to hear today so in two years we're going to have an item of uh the debt exclusion for durfee the diamond what are we looking at for how much is the debt for the city every year from this presentation right here i can't tell you what is the number going to be we always say it's 10 million it's not 10

million but we always say that what is it going to be next year yeah that's the kind of forecasting that i think that we need to do to say we're in we're in a place right now where we have a very difficult time and it's just frustrating as a member of the school committee to sit here and and hear this three years ago i think it was three years ago maybe even four or three years

ago i sat over on that side we talked about the business trash being three hundred thousand dollars three years ago it's a it's it's actually i don't even have good words to say about how the heck are we sitting here on april 7th and we've left three hundred thousand dollars on the table for three years in a row and we don't have a lot of money for this and that we

now in your budget you'd be able to say we can reduce it by 300 thousand now we sit here and we listen well maybe later but it's going to be extended but we might get a thing i ca that can't be tolerated it shouldn't be tolerated i sit at home as a citizen watching these meetings and i get frustrated because some of this stuff just doesn't it just doesn't add up and it doesn't make sense uh

the trash needs to be addressed that we all know we all know that to council lee's point about there was a savings of money for the recycling i would challenge anybody to to find out where was the rfp for that uh that went out to ask actually ask people to bid on that project i can tell i can tell anybody didn't happen it didn't happen you didn't go to all

the vendors and say what can you do what can you do so it wasn't like a miraculous thing that savings the actual industry just changed at that time so no matter what company it was going to be was going to give you less revenues like if you ask somebody to buy gas today and last year was less now it's more that's basically what happened with with that but when when you look at the

forecast i want the council to know we on the school side have asked these questions to our superintendent and our finance director get a five-year budget sustainability we had 200 positions in the budget something like that i asked them to try to look at this to so they can show us how if you want me to vote on something how am i going to be confident that we'll have the money to keep these folks going forward

they gave us a one-pager very simple very clear from mr almeida and mrs ponce talks about the five-year budget sustainability 2023 24 25 the budget basically is going to go up 17 every year at that same time the required local contribution which is on your side goes up two million three million two million and three million for the next five years that information should be in part of

something that we're talking about here because that's a decision that you're gonna make whether we know we're gonna have to pay two million more last meeting with the mayor asked about the transportation and i said it at a school committee meeting i'll say it again i'm not opposed to trying to help out on things that we have to do but we have to know as a school committee what is going on on the city side

as well as we have voted as a school committee for every single opera fund that's what they call lesser funds on our city side we as the school committee some new ones maybe weren't here at the time school committee voted on every single dollar that went through esser and opera my personal opinion you all should have been doing the same thing because you are letting the administration nothing against mayor

or anybody in the administration the city council should have a say in how those funds as a group just like the school committee had that's part of the problem is one side's doing one thing the other side's doing another i would like to point if to that point um myself and a few other counselors here were pushing for that and it came down a line from corporation council that this was

not our call to make unfortunately and i didn't i personally wasn't ready to go to court about that myself maybe we should have i don't know but that was a cost that i wasn't ready to take on that so i yield on that yeah no i hear you i maybe you just accepted it i would i would caution you not to accept things like that in the future that just would

be my um my take we talk about school transportation i think this is an issue that when we sit down as a group we need to also address so the mayor's right we spend 11 million dollars in transportation one such item on the transportation is homeless mckinney vento funds so when a child is homeless or deemed homeless we are mandated to pay so it's an unfunded of not a fully funded mandate from the state for

mckinney-vento transportation funds so this needs to be funded at 100 by the legislature this isn't funded at 100 by the legislature so we could help reduce some of these costs by lobbying those folks because this is a these are real numbers 40 percent 42 33 70 last year so we're basically paying about a million dollars a year the city is to pay for these funds why in the hell does

the city have the state has all this money why are they not funding 100 last week i emailed uh the delegation superintendent saying this needs to be funded this is this is basically low-hanging fruit this is something everybody should be advocating for including the administration i'm sure they're fighting with them this is stuff that we can do that's long term they fund this a million dollars every

year 100 reimbursable that's a million less than we can have so it's not using one-time monies to help with the transportation it's going to be forever and i think that's part of the reason why we need to collaborate we need to meet we need to get real information it's not something that we can just like kick the can down the road though when we talk about transportation i don't think it's a secret that i was

very upset uh a year and a half ago when covet came and i felt that the city wasn't treating the vendors fairly relative to the bus contracts very vocal about that i got criticized by the administration i got criticized by other school committee members for taking a stand on it but we i'm not backing off on it and this lawsuits that are going to get filed against the city

if we don't fund it so to mrs ponce's credit mr pacheco's credit back in december we actually met to talk about ways that to make sure that the fund the vendors were treated fairly so we we met in december we agreed on one amount that was owed for one thing in 30 days we were going to get a report back from the administration school administration working with the vendors in the city to

say now you're going to have another bill so when we're looking at a forecast for you all there's at least a million dollars that with that the city owes to those vendors they can say it's going to go to court it's going to go this telling you right now in a public meeting we owe the money we should pay the money because it's the right thing to do that's going to come from somewhere

so when you see these things that say we got seven million we got eight million you don't have seven or eight million because you're taking money that you owe to the schools you're going to owe to the tax to the bus vendors it's gonna keep adding up and you only can get the same million dollars spent so many times so that's an issue that you all should be aware of i think the school committee

is already aware of it but we need to address that because that's money owed i told the mayor as i was talking to him about whether we were going to pay for rsa funds that i want to all of those things corrected first before i even consider looking forward so i'm not saying i'm going to be against all that stuff but we have to figure it out and if we use rsf funds we already voted to

budget those so now we have to take another vote to take it out of somewhere else we're not sitting on like the 10 million that the city has in the in the funds right now are not allocated all of our essa funds have been allocated on different projects and the like so if we say we're going to take 2 million to pay for transportation one time which is going to create a structural deficit

we got to take it from somewhere so i don't want you to think that we're not opposed to helping and i'm not opposed to helping but i want to get all these things answered before we get to that next step of uh you know what it is um i would ask that if they i i saw a five-year forecast in january from the administration i just saw that yesterday first time it was dated january

in it it talks about school department indirect costs agreement is going to change maybe transportation like i have never seen it honestly god haven't seen it i just saw it today because the council gave it to me when i asked them but that's in january i asked in public meetings are we going to change the indirect cost agreement no that was the answer i got from the administration so i assume we're not changing the

indirect cross agreement but now maybe we are you get my frustration a little bit because it doesn't seem like things are just uh are all adding up so um i just want you to know that i'm willing to meet with anybody any time to do my homework i've totally administration that um but some of this stuff needs to get out more in the so everyone's on the same page we i don't want to make the

taxpayers pay more either but if you don't have the money you got to do something you can't just say we're going to wait where did the 2.2 million dollars come from maybe the administration can just answer that like where did that number actually fall out of madam president before before we move on can we have one of the clerks just run and get the um five-year forecast that was done in

february i think it was really the 22nd so they just it to mr aggie's point it does project out and and shows deficits and and years that are coming out so when the question is flush do you want to take a recess no i i don't know no i don't i don't think so i just had that i just have that one last question i'm just curious to see where the 2.2 came from

what 2.2 pounds so the opera funds of 2.2 million that they're going to reduce you said you're going to reduce the um came out of lost revenue yeah but how did you arrive it's time the drive for the building just half yeah that's it for two years well for one year right now mayor coogan could you speak into the microphone we can't hear you yeah it's half of the

bill so just half of the bill not it's not because that's what we think we can afford based on the projections no we think i figure i think it's to give the tax payers and fall over break that's what we did and the number one half was just because it's half because that's not because of the numbers the forecasts or anything else that's what we thought we could do to

give the taxpayers a break and still be fiscally proven yep when when we went to the voters uh for the debt exclusion what were we supposed to pay what was it told to it says in here that as we told the i think 100 question came from council dion said what did you tell the people when they voted for it what what did we tell the people that we were going to pay

for the debt exclusion i'm trying to think of the value of the house it was like 112 or 120 for a 200 yeah no i what i meant what i meant let me clarify how many million dollars per year were we supposed to pay for the debt exclusion it projected forward when we went to the voters i think it was like 4.8 i'm not sure the final number i was going to say 4.5 4.8 million i

know the number it was 3.6 million was what we told the voters was that what they the additional that that mrs sahady said they we had to win the original no no no the original the original so the original budget when we went to the voters because you had mentioned when you said what did they say what did we go to them for 3.6 million times eight years after the

eight years it was going to get cut off and there would be no more payment so i would like to request of the administration to give to the school committee and the city council a forecast of what it was said at that time and what are you looking at now for how much you're going to charge the voters for the debt exclusion moving forward i know you don't have that answer now but i respectfully ask that

somebody send that to us it's very valuable information with that i yield thank you thank you is there anything further from the school committee on the city budget anything further from the council counseling seat seven council i just want to make a comment when i heard uh school committeeman aggie are talking about transportation i agree transportation is huge but truth be told council kadeem and i went

up to boston a couple of years back that we went up to boston to try to fight for the transportation and the mckinney-vento bill so is it something that we want to continue to fight for we've been there we tried and the state wasn't fighting on it but i agree with you that uh you know something needs to be done about that and as far as when covert hit and people weren't using the bus

did those companies i don't know i don't know any of the companies but did those companies get any money from covert relief and if they got money from covert relief how much did they get and what's the difference of what the whole contract was going to be and then it would be fair to pay them the difference so that you know they could pay their workers and still pay the insurance on that council

yeah i think that i think the answer we went back and forth on that for a long time that was one of the issues that kevin and i disagreed on those companies did get millions and millions of dollars and that would be what would happen if if as he pointed out earlier in december there was a valid request for a hundred thousand dollars i've said it from day

one we owe a bill we'll pay it but for the longest time we weren't getting the accurate amount of money that those companies picked up from the ppp or ppe whatever it was called so if that's what if kevin's right again which he could be this time if their numbers and what we owe don't balance out with what they made up in the federal money which is very similar to opera money for bus companies then

we'll have to work something out with them but that's what that's to be seen i have not heard that uh he was nice enough to show me a paper tonight that there that that's their request but i believe that that would be something that would have to be hammered out between the city and the bus company and when it comes up what they got what did they spend it on let's see where we end

up and if it if we owe them money i have no problem i i will never stick people that we owe money to for the city i'm not doing that if we owe someone some money we're going to pay them and that's what's going to happen with the bus companies if they come to a resolution with us we can figure out where we belong we'll get there i'm not the person to ask that so maybe

we could have mr pacheco come down to answer that question because he's the one that had the meeting in january with the company so he could maybe enlighten the council on what that meeting was like just so you're a little more aware yeah i think he raised a valid question but i think mr pacheco would be the best to answer that question if we owe somebody fine i'm just thinking if they got ppe money

like a lot of places did then i think it's fair that we pay them what you know what their contract was and what they got or didn't get um but no i mean he doesn't have to with that i yield thank

it's pretty easy

welcome mr patrick thanks for having me um so i don't have obviously i don't have the documents in front of me but i can tell you that two of the companies um are almost identical in the amount that um the billing you know that we received so they're almost identical in the 700 000 range okay what we don't have is any documents on whether or not they did receive any ppp money or any other stimulus package

uh to offset their losses so two companies i have of one company um is um did receive money and is not requesting money from us of the three bus companies that we do have now that is for if i get this right last year's funds the first year of covid when we were ordered to close no company has been paid the full amount because we were not in control of that

at the time so we didn't order the closure the second year was partial some of it was vote by school by the schools and some of it was federal um state i'm sorry so there was a there was a discrepancy it's about um i want to say about 40 49 days last year that we were out and the first year was about 60 61 days so two different two different pieces the city does have documents

litigation documents for from one company for both years any of these people in litigation now yes well there's documents that have been back and forth it is it is uh a filing though it is a call you know documents well if it's a court document i don't i have the change so that's two so one company has both years in litigation the other company does not the other two companies do not

okay thank you mr pacheco you're welcome can i ask if uh generally speaking yes do you feel that um the companies are owed something for those years i've always said that from day one i'm not that it's not my pay grade uh to make those decisions i i think that there's a lot more information that the companies the conversation there's a lot more conversation that needs to happen about

what their actual costs are if someone didn't have expenses such as um if this is going to be also against the city and everyone's well aware of it and i don't think we should be talking about it period i don't think we should be asking people's opinions um second point of order to counsel camaras point i i agree i was going to say i i think we're going to state the

same thing it's not the appropriate type of place to be expanded especially when we know they're coming i'm sorry so i disagree i i hope it will just cease and continue at another point in time maybe in the courtroom um i trust that mr chico is not saying anything that he's that he shouldn't be saying that's just getting an opinion it can be damaging yeah so mr pacheco doesn't have to give his opinion i know

i pretty much know where he stands so december 13 2021 memo from to the members of the committee from mr pachico talked about the memo providing the 105 000 that we had all agreed upon was for wait time yes that was paid to they went to the city for the council thank you for that we paid the bill the last statement on this once again is dated december 13 2021.

this month we will continue to meet with the vendors and discuss above matters along with the city and we will report back to the committee with any resolution that talks about after these meetings as they occur so this happened in december so what i'm asking for is it has nothing to do with a lawsuit it i asked about this in december mr pacheco met with the companies and the superintendent they met with the

companies so there was a there was a conversation to try to either ask for information or what do you what do you have i'll tell you the end result of those conversations were positive for the bus companies that they weren't going to get zero which is what i've been advocating all along so they needed to give some information but that's december of 2021.

i just don't know how the trash is going on and on and on and nobody's getting anywhere with it this is the same thing we need to wrap this up we owe these vendors money to do what's right by people we owe vendors money i put them in emails i've been criticized for it the end of the day is we owe some of these vendors money after they got expenses or whatever

i told anybody that gets all this one of the companies got a lot of money i said how much do we owe he said i don't know i said what the heck you mean you don't know how much would we owe you i don't know i said well you gotta tell us and then if we owe you 300 000 and you say i don't want the 300 000 because i got

some money you send us a letter we'll send you a thank you that's what i'm trying to do this is going on a year already so if i sound a little frustrated that's why this has been going on and on and on and everybody just says oh it's in litigation oh it's going to get taken care of it's good how about these vendors that got a contract for 180 days and we only paid them for 140.

i don't know anybody that runs a business that would think that's okay and we just keep on saying they got all this money well how long is it going to take for us to ask them and to figure it out the school community ag yeah i'm not saying you're right or you're wrong i'm not saying we like the man just said we're not going to stiff anybody this council never steps anybody so i agree

with if you owe money you pay if you don't own money you don't but well the point is you're asking someone an opinion of a court case that's going to be going on i don't think this is the appropriate place for it that's all but like in in your case right you you work for a business you wouldn't just say a year and a half two years just let it go

if my business was in a lawsuit that i was involved with i'd say we can't talk about how long would you let it go excuse me you own the business how long i couldn't talk about it but you would at least try to to talk to the people that owe you money the attorneys would do i wouldn't do the public meeting you're right correct i think you're right it would be scary

as a city council as americans excuse me can we keep an order here so my concern is as a budget forecast as part of this meeting you all should be aware that there's other things coming down but you're going to owe money that was the point of bringing that up that's right that's my only thing and i think it's a valid point and i would hope to get an answer on it sooner rather than

later appreciate it fair enough thank you thank you one might can i have my pony order address please sure um are these matters discussed an executive session at school committee meetings if they are they should not be discussed here no no because the the school committee is not the ones not paying it's the city so it's a city issue not a school issue there's is the schools had the money

in that budget so that would be under our preview in executive session what happened at the end of one of the years is the city took the 3.6 million or the other money and they put it in the city side and now it became a city issue so i really have no i can't bring that up an executive session for us because it's not a city issue i've been told by the mayor and

other folks on the city side that's a city issue let me handle it i've been trying to deal with it through the prior council president to other people so it's really a city issue maybe you all need to go an executive session one meeting to talk about it that might be a good idea because but we are the one not paying point of view but we have to counsel kilby we have talked about it in

executive session maybe once or twice but it was back maybe um during the height of the pin democlin the transportation stopped when the money was in our purview now it's on this side i yield thank you thank you seat a counselor pozo anything for the council anything further from the school committee on the city presentation just quickly i guess if we could just quickly go over the um the five-year forecast i mean

school committee manager asked about the five-year forecast i think everybody has it now so um do you guys

you can take mine i don't need it you just let us know i mean i'm not looking to believe with the points looks like we're wasting our time but i don't think it's a waste of time so fy23 i mean the the question was asked budget surplus deficit and this is just for the general fund fy 23 4.9 million in the whole 24 was 5.8 in the whole 25 is the deficit of 7.4 million

26 is a 9.2 million deficit and then 27 was a 10 million deficit kevin did you say deficit i i wasn't deficit all of them were deficits for the future how many years five years all right that that's different than what we just heard somebody asked about the deficit and then everybody was like well what deficit what are you talking about just an observation from sitting here she said it they said what are you

talking about now we see find this it says that like i thought she asked about this year maybe i'm wrong i wasn't specifying a time i asked how we're going to address deficits obvious well i think it's a discussion we've had multiple times we've talked i mean we spent a year and a half discussing using one-time funds was creating a structural deficit that down the road was going to be painful because we would have

deficits that we would have to overcome and we'd have to replace those monies so in essence i don't think i was specifically speaking just now but in terms i mean we know eventually we're going to hit deficits how are we going to handle them what are we doing now to address deficits that are coming at us maybe that's the way i should have phrased the question i mean i i you know are we doing

anything to to start addressing those issues you want me to comment yeah i mean first of all i mean this five-year forecast seeing how i've been involved in forecasting for years it changed dramatically when the governor released his budget you know so when this forecast was made you know a lot of things have changed you know the world opened up a little bit you know pandemic got a little bit more under control but

if you look at this you know when just the revenue stream alone i mean you know you're looking at a uh maybe around a 13 million dollar uh positive increase in revenues and of course when you take out the uh one-time money and then when you take out the 1.6 million dollars in stabilization fund from 22 you take out the money that was used at that time in free cash and you

take out that but based on what was known when this five-year forecast was produced i mean give me a ball i mean let's use somebody's got a crystal ball that they can do a better job you know with somebody's been doing this for years this type of projection needs to be done on an ongoing basis what i'm saying is now that once you see and we still don't know yet the final

outcome from the house and senate on the state revenue once that all settles down then which the first thing you would do is you would then take 23 and re-establish your base and then project from there but the goal is to reduce the reliance on one-term revenue that's that's for every especially cities that's for every city even towns that's for every city you know so i mean all i'm seeing is

these these documents are fluid i don't i can't answer for not sharing it with the school committee if i'd have thought about it when it was given to the city council i would have more than happily shared it with the school committee i just didn't really think about it i mean you know i wasn't thinking of presenting it to the school committee the object was to get it to the city council under the charter uh

regulations that's i mean that was my intent so counselor the vice president i think it's important to note that when that those projections were originally made there was an anticipation of certain increases that ended up not being as much as we thought they would be health insurance is a great example they were projecting a 10 increase and it turned out to be only two and a half that was amazing and so

the reason why we haven't given you an updated five-year plan because obviously what we just presented is significantly different than what the former cfo presented a year or so ago is that my charge to mr agapony was to focus on getting this year's budget delivered getting it as tight and as balanced as possible and creating a set of circumstances where the new cfo could succeed and then start projecting from there

um i think uh reducing the amount of money that we're looking at for capital expenditures as well as um accounting for things increasing in cost less than we thought they might is what brings us to something that's better than a four and a half million dollar deficit that was projected a year ago so i would say to your question what are we doing that's what we're doing um we're we're getting

real numbers we're plugging those in we're seeing how they work for us or against us and then doing our very best to make sure that we're not relying on one time money that we're having the numbers that we're using for projections be as tight and as real as possible and we're going to continue doing that as much as we can and we have a really dynamic cfo who's going to overlap not

just take over but overlap for mr acapponi and hopefully continue this so that what the council's seeing are real numbers uh numbers that you can rely on more than something that that turns out to have been several million dollars off so okay thank you without a yield thank you anything further from the council mr again may i just ask another question uh mr pony i agree with what you said i

don't disagree what you said i don't want you to take any offense yeah the only difference when i when i looked at the document that said january the part that got me was the parts in there that were related to the school department so those parts should have been talked about with the superintendent i agree as we go forward with the whole school committee so we can know what would that's what got me

about that five-year forecast now this meeting in my opinion in april we all should have gotten you're saying the numbers are a lot much different than in january my opinion is we should have got at least a one or two pager on now updating the new five-year forecast some sort of slide that says things have changed since the last one here's where we're at this is what we'll look at it would give

us all more confidence if we had something like that to say the numbers have changed a slight bit but if we don't have that i can only go by what i see and what i watch from home and what i saw was that that document back then all this other info so my suggestion would be that sooner than later get a one or two pages to everybody to say here's where they're changing the

numbers are looking in a decent direction why i gave you a grief about that where did you come up with the 2.2 50 percent because it shouldn't just be a 50 like a guest like we flip a coin and say you know it should be this is what we can afford based on the information we get in the projection it might have been five million it might have been no million it might have had

to do with something like if we want to pay for the diamond we need to keep this that you know so that's all i was asking i wasn't trying to diminish what you're working on i'm sure you're working hard but the more info we have the better off we can support it that that's and i think when you look at the school committee to try to give our essa funds we have to have a picture of

what are you facing if you tell me you're flush i'm going to tell you then you don't need our 2 million and money if you tell me the honest story about we're facing potential large deficits and the like whatever it makes our vote a lot easier to say maybe we'll help you with this because we're not going to give away school committee friends if you're flush that's what i'm saying but my last

question was do you know how much the two and a half percent is going to yield for the um so if you raise taxes just a two and a half percent does it yield three point something million three and a half million uh whatever because i think what will end up happening if you to counsel dion's question about where is it what is it gonna look like let's just suppose that two and a half percent increase

equals 2.2 million it doesn't but let's just say it did so then the people would know my increase on my taxes for the debt exclusion is 2.5 so there's like a percentage you can look at to say two and a half percent yields the city three point something million then you get the percentage and you'd say my my debt exclusion pot was 1.7 or something along those lines so you don't

if you don't have it so be it but i think that's a valid number to just give everybody ahead but it went out whatever it is that in the future just i think it will help us excuse me for fiscal uh okay a fiscal uh uh 23 uh if you increase the the base by two and a half percent you're looking at about two point nine million just a little under three million dollars yep

so we get you could take that number and then take what is the 2.5 right for the thing and then it's like two percent and you take so new growth and that's really what's going to help the city but but in in in help getting help from the school committee what it's going to do what it's going to do is it's going to help the city this year to get to to plan for 24 and

25 about the one-time money and it was with some help on transportation it's it's it's it's complicated to spell it out and reduce it to some smaller frames but you're right about the five-year plan being updated i also think you got to be honest and say that you're leaving two and a half million dollars in people that people voted for on for their taxes for the debt exclusion so yeah i i get

the idea of giving a benefit but you're leaving two when it's like when you don't raise taxes and it compounds so just all i'm asking for is to show us everything and i'd be more than willing to look at anything the mayor presents as far as uh trying for us to help thank you are you thank you mayor coogan could you make sure that the school committee and city council get an updated five-year forecast please

i'm sorry they want an updated five-year forecast oh yeah i have no problem with that i'll what i'll do is i'll plug in oh i'm sorry uh madam president i'll email it to yeah to the council and the school committee police thank you councilman c2 council commissioner forward i think the school committee should just maybe to the secretary or to the superintendent just give them a copy

of the fire plan we have our meeting back then and they can it's it's public they can get a hold of it but just we'll send them a copy like we said it to the library and everyone else that needs to have sort of the public time was really impressive i mean if that you know when we were just meeting the charter requirements only work by the time i just want to question them

like i said earlier what we're going to give you the five-year forecast is basically another draft yeah right so i mean i looked at that and i at the meeting we had i don't know if council damper i wasn't here but i said this is going to change it's impossible to go out five years and forecast accurately because the numbers do change they change periodically and so you can have it i i don't give a much

attention because it's going to change significantly and when we get closer to the dates of when everything comes through what the state is actually going to give us or what we're going to increase and what the property value is actually going to be when they do a valve then i say now we have more and more numbers and more concrete we get a lot better to work with rather than getting a five-year forecast

that's gonna change significantly as it just did i like the council president's idea of asking them to do it because it's correct we'll give it to you but i'm just saying don't give away appreciate the council president saying that it's a valid thing superintendent i'm not saying won't give it to him said we'll give it to you but just don't take those numbers as concrete numbers they

will change significantly because we get them and the ones he's going to give us next week it's going to be better than the one in january correct i'm talking about going forward next year when we give you the initial five-year forecast you know and like we get them they will change but i think we should have them if you should share them sure i don't want to keep anything from you you can

have them we've all been we don't even have executive session there because we want to be that transparent so i'm willing to give you everything that's her all my colleagues on you can have all that information just my own question is it's a draft it will change

anything further from the council or the school committee on the city presentation thank you gentlemen thank you guys take a two minute recess while the school committee gets set up

do

do

joint meeting will now come back to order we have the presentation from the school committee good evening everyone good evening mayor coogan madam president council members city council members and school committee members thank you for the opportunity um so before i turn it over to kevin i just wanted to give you a little uh brief overview of our process we have um it really has been a collaborative process

um we met with our building leaders one by one with our team they advocate if their needs our department directors uh department heads um we had our budget hearings with our school committee listened to them and took some feedback and what you will see is a proposed budget that reflects the advocated needs for our students and our staff and and to make sure that our buildings are running efficiently

you will see that there is a considerable investment in positions one of the things that we know that would come back from a pandemic and this is going to take us a while to recover we know that we need to put more our focus was direct services what's happening in the classroom um we're investing in uh additional pairs so that every single kindergarten first grade has a paraprofessional

it's a lot for uh to have uh 25 five-year-olds in the classroom with one person so that's a commitment that we're making we also have additional teachers for support staff whether that's intervention interventionist special needs teachers whatever it is that our students um need and we have some ceo i'm sorry some sel services support staff also for the needs of our students we we were very intentional to create a

budget that was direct services focused as well as taking the opportunity to also um uh create efficiencies within our buildings and within our uh fallout public schools department um yes we are receiving um uh what some many have said is a huge increase in chapter 78 that's due to the soa formula has changed really that's money that um you know that the formula was the same for everybody and really

now people are recognizing that it costs a lot more to to educate students that have high needs special needs students english language learners etc so the formula is changing will continue to change for the next four years and then it will stabilize but it the budget will you know i know that it impacts your budget which is our budget because we're all on the same team here so um it's

important to note we recognize that we are also receiving extra funds we are advocating for 100 net school spending which is the minimum that we are that is required right and kevin will go through each of those pieces but um it really has been a process that really has been focused on our students and our staff in in our building so that we create a high performing district because if we're going to try to

get people into the city the first thing they're going to look at is schools and you know it will pay off we just need to invest in our students in our schools so kelly good evening everybody good evening thank you for having me here tonight so marie already touched upon the student opportunity act we're all very well aware of it the student opportunity act recognizes that it costs more to educate students with

high needs specifically in the areas of special education english language learners the costs associated with fringe benefits with health insurance and the low-income population so those factors factored into the increase with the student opportunity act and so uh with this with the law specifically with the low income factor uh in this past year we actually went up we went from sub group 11 to subgroup 12 which is

the uh highest foundation rate that we can receive for a low-income student and so i just put the slide up there uh all the state agencies have kind of caught up so they're actually capturing the low-income students years ago when we started to capture the number of students it was kind of a mesh of getting all the numbers together and so we've see we're at a point now where out of our um

12 000 kids when you factor in the charter schools uh that nearly 9 000 of our students are uh low-income students so we get a huge amount of money from that from that category specifically so this slide is representative of uh the past you know five years and it gives you a representation of what this year through the governor's budget what the chapter 70 amount is as you can see

the chapter 70 amount in the governor's budget is just over 168 million which is 23.2 million more than this year or a 16 increase in chapter 70.

that increase is is due to a couple different factors but you know the two big points are we actually have an increase of 209 kids in our foundation formula from last year because we had seen the the drop last year in addition to that inflation went up about four and a half percent which is one of the biggest inflation increases we've seen in the time that i've actually been here so

this is the slide on the required local contribution so the required look contribution for the city is going up by two million dollars in the governor's budget uh this year in 2022 it's 34.2 million it's projected to be 36.3 million in 2023 so again this slide just gives you shows you back dating back to 2018 shows you where we started and where we are now net school spending so for in the fy 23 governor's budget net

school spending is just under 205 million dollars as you can see it's come a long way from the 140 million where we were in 2018 so six almost 65 million dollar increase in six years um 25.2 million more than in 2022 or a 14.1 percent increase just a quick we you know the city and the schools have an indirect cost agreement where they agree to the costs that are funded

on the city side that get reported on the end of the year report and just that all that is documented in an agreement and so anytime there's a dispute uh you know with any costs you know that that can be worked out by both parties or you can get the desc involved if needed to as we did in the past so this this slide here provides you what what what the costs are that are

eligible for net school spending that are included in the indirect cost agreement that get reported in the end of the year report i just you know the big ones are the health and life insurance um the fall of a retirement system and the next biggest one is the charter school and the assessments those are the big items that get reported these costs here are the costs that are ineligible that that are city costs that

get reported so the long-term debt principle and interest the bond participation notes school crossing guards the regional school assessments for diamond and bristol aggie purchase of landing buildings and equipment over 150 000 transportation so this is just a rundown of the last six years of transportation and what we've what we've paid over the last uh you know four years so last year was that 8 million

this year so that was one of the pandemic years this year we're currently at 7.5 million projected to spend 10.7 million dollars this year and again transportation is not eligible for net school spending it gets reported as a cost but it's not over health insurance so health insurance over the last six years has been very very stable on the school side it's ranged as high as 22.4 million last

year to as low as 20.9 million in fiscal year 2019.

this is just a slide on where we wound up in each year in meeting the net school spending requirement so for fy21 when the city when the state provided us with their report we were 3.2 million dollars short just of note the uh of that 1.8 million dollars was associated with prepaid tuitions that's a cost that will get recognized in f by 22. but that is money that you guys

truly gave us that we use towards that so what's left over for 21 was the 1.44 million which mr ayakoponi referenced tonight we'll be coming down to you uh next week hopefully for your approval so just this is just national law chapter 71 section 68 so it is the responsibility of the city to maintain our schools the transportation of children and the school committee representation so i just referenced that

and just so that you can see so over the last several years we have actually funded some major capital investments over on our side to off to help and offset the the city and the school committee has been instrumental in helping in that effort so this is just the slide talking about the 1.4 million dollars that's coming down so this slide provides you with just a breakdown of some of the items that

we've that that with the school committee vote that we've taken on over the last couple years uh so as you can see the durfee field house facade for 1.1 million taliban drainage in parking lot for just over a million dollars the pace building the new electrical service that we put in there for 572 000 pace building chiller relocation and pump installation for 420 000 the construction of the egress road over

at henry lloyd and the derpy cafeteria equipment for 245 000. so as you can see we've made some major investments over on the school side to to help to help the city here in addition to that through our easer funds we have we have set aside significant funding to address hvac needs across all of our schools and we are going to do we're going to do a big window project over at henry lord

as they do for windows so this is the slide on isr funds um so our three sr allocations total 61.3 million dollars they the sr3 which is the last grant the most recent grant that we just got approved for will sunset in september of 2024 so um i project that we we are going to spend down the easter one grant by the end of the year um we are we have already begun spending

the easter two grants and are in process of spending the easter three grant so you know things that we've spent the grants on to date are monies associated with covid uh to the private schools we've spent money on nurses associate recovery rooms while we had coveted going we've spent a lot of money on technology we funded to date a million dollars in transportation that a vote that the school committee had taken

through esr uh we've also we've had we've had to add through some specific special ed programming needs through there we're doing pre-k expansion and as i've already discussed hvac needs to the schools so for fy23 the budget that we are proposing to you our school operating budget is 141 million 857 792. as a superintendent mentioned it is a hundred percent of net school spending no doubt no no dollar more than that

uh our transportation budget that we're moving forward with is 11 million dollars so with this budget we have the listing here for all the new positions that are going to the budget and as you can see it is a lot of positions but it's very very student-focused student-driven it's 165 new positions through the operating budget nine positions through the esa grant 66 of those are paris which was which

the superintendent referenced mostly mostly paris to address the k-1 needs also addressing pre-k needs to get two pre-k pre-k powers in every single classroom in addition to that every single one of our sub separate special education classrooms will have two paris and every single one of those classrooms and various other needs that we have up here um so with that we'll open it up to questions

counselor counselor puzzle for your pre-k your pre-k expansion in these new positions is that associated at all so as you begin to expand your pre-k program are these powers a part of that or is that going to be something down the road so that'll that'll that'll wind up being something down the road we have it budgeted we have a budget of foreign for the pre-k expansion the problem is until we get a site

or until we get a rental that we know how many classrooms is going to be at that point we'll make that we'll address that with the school committee and tell them it's how many positions we need to do that okay thank you i yield thank you because one two seven council prayer a question that i have have you hired on or looking in this year's budget to put on more counselors yeah

yeah how many more have you are we we actually um our school committee took a vote and added 10 positions we have hired some we still have some posted um like everyone else we're facing a shortage of staffing but um there were 10 additional counselors that were allocated for this year to as an addition to the already staff that we had and we also have um projected four in this budget to add an additional four okay

thank you you're welcome i yeah you yield anything further from the council i do have one question mr almeida you had mentioned 245 000 for derpy cafeteria equipment this is the new derpy yes was it equipment that wasn't expected in the build no i think it was i think it was expected it's just i i believe they were just looking for some coverage to free up some funding within the durfee project

thank you councilman seat one thank you madam president so uh just two quick questions the first one um in terms of i think it was school committed man aguero who mentioned uh that he got a lovely um one-page paper showing that they're the sustainability of the budget so can you just talk a little bit about the sustainability um just especially with the number of hires that you've got uh position new

positions coming in absolutely so over the next several years through 2027 so even this even this year i wasn't expecting an inflation factor of four and a half percent but um with that said we will stay stable with our number of students if not increase i'm hoping because of durfee we saw an increase in derpy this year and i do expect to see it increase you know over time um but in addition to that

we're going to see at a minimum a 10 million increase a year for the next you know through 2027 and we're to a point now where we feel pretty comfortable with our staffing any additional position needs that may arise from here on out are going to be few and far between so we will not see something that's going to be committing to the budget so much so much so over the years in addition to that we've

we've made some you know as far as you know like the stone school and you know our special need you know side we've actually seen our special ed tuitions come down a bit over the last several years and a lot of this to do with that we've been taking a lot of those kids and putting them at stone in addition to the stone piece we we've we started to generate some

money through the stone school so we've actually we were reporting to the school committee on um on monday our next quarterly report and as of that quote of the report we actually 350 000 that we've already you know come up with there uh but those are just you know some things but we given where we are and the amount of money that's coming in through um through the student opportunity act

uh we are in a place where we will be fine over the next several years and i guess my my biggest concern obviously is as you know chapter 70 monies increase and unesco spending costs increase so do the local contributions so uh in terms of that and and i think that's where the whole sustainability on the city side comes into play and i'll be interested to see the the updated um you know five year

forecast to see how that kind of impacts but are you having conversations and are you in communication with the uh i guess the administration you know cities administration in terms of what your projections are looking like in terms of enrollment and projected increases in chapter 70s absolutely okay and then can you just speak a little bit about to the i guess the one call center um

that the school committee or maybe the school committee can speak to you know just approving one call center i i as one counselor take significant exception to the fact that you're approving a bottom line i mean essentially that's what the city council does right the city council appropriates uh funding at a bottom line we anticipate and expect that the uh you know those folks that are in charge of

the jurisdiction over there which is the school committee would be looking at various cost centers and not just one bottom line so so what i'll say uh what i'll say is this we provide you we provide the school committee with a budget that breaks it all out and i'm not gonna you know they the school committee ultimately votes on currently the current policy votes on the bottom but all the information's there our

policies are you know my our policy that i've always used i've been there is very very strict it's all line item based it's all you know done to the letter of the law you know the way you know to the letter of my my ethical law it's always it's done that way but we are actually moving the policy forward monday night that states that going forward that everything is going to be

cost center-based okay we are going to work on something for fy23 after this budget process is over that's going to be something that's sufficient for the school committee to to have a cost-center-based budget going forward and develop that going forward perfect i appreciate that thought i yield thank you council council on c2 council camara thank you mr president just real quick i know transportation

you guys are north now of 11 million dollars has there been any discussion enough that i'm a fan of it but i'm just curious are we talking maybe at some point what point do we try to bring this in-house i know if you have any discussions whether or not we should try to bring this in-house at all or with the city at all to see i'll just i'll just give my my opinion on it

my my opinion is i don't know that we want to get into the bus the bus business and i say that because i've i've seen over the years since i've been here most cities and towns that were in the bus business and not in the bus business i'm not going to disagree with you so i i just want to make sure at some point someone's going to say okay we're at over 15 million dollars

you know what time do we so we've so we i i think we've been pretty prudent here on on this on this side you know what we've done you know we try to tier as much as we can to keep the costs down as much as we can we've brought on these we've brought on the couriers and so the couriers do like the long the routes that would cost us a

lot of money we try to get them to do those routes so that it cuts down those kind of things so you know we try to do is do the best job we can possible you know to you know given what we have so okay just want to check and see if there's any conversation going on because people have asked is there savings has been the course analysis done to see whether or

not would make sense to bring it in-house and but i'm not saying i disagree with you at all i think it is it's not cheap no yeah with that i yield thank you thank you counselor counselor at c5 councillor lee um thank you um i really don't have questions regarding i mean we we know we see the numbers coming down you have more money now coming down you ever

probably have in a very long time so i'm sure even though we all have challenges i'm sure it's appreciated that you have these increases um i i wanted to i just i asked this the last time i was here too is the the ex the extra spending or the extra funding that you're getting um and i believe you said something to the tune of you're taking a more direct service approach

and i just needed to know i guess i need to know what what exactly does that look like because i what i care about now at this point is now do you have the funding what metrics what specific you know goals do you come into the budget season looking to improve so that way we can tangibly see that this increasing in funding is actually you know helping the kids that we're trying to you know serve um

ultimately though what was a challenge prior to the increases and what have you seen that's been improved since the increases well i think that when i say direct services we're talking about what's happening in the classroom how do we support our teachers how do we support our students we've also made investments in curriculum and instruction everybody in this room school committee as well as city council

everybody deserves to see that their money is being well spent and that we're getting something out of it where the tangible is going to be our we have an achievement gap no one can argue that right so we have to make sure that we prepare our staff through professional development we give them the resources that they need we equip them with the the support in the class with paraprofessionals whether it's you know

additional counseling whatever it is to support students and help them get them ready to learn and then then teachers can do their job and we will see results in data so like retainability and turnover has have those numbers improved you know over time or do you anticipate that they will yeah that this is not a good year to ask that question because we're all struggling with staffing right

there's a shortage everywhere certainly retention is something that we're working on recruitment and retention um we have to make sure that we support those people that we're hiring preparing them i i think that this has been the you know i've been at this for a long long time and this has been probably the hardest year that we've ever seen i think everybody's thought we're going to

take off the masks we're going to come back in person and we're going to be back to normal so hard so statistically metrically wise you temper your expectations a little when you see these challenges coming up correct okay so now that we're sort of sort of moving into a better direction pandemic wise um you went to i'm guessing you anticipate to see improvements in some of these areas i'm

assuming absolutely okay absolutely all right um so budget to budget you have these challenges that come year to year um what what what specifically do you see is right now upcoming you see the biggest challenges i believe transportation for transportation debate is going to be a big one but um you know what what do you see as something that you see funding is going to definitely help improve that we can

we can put our finger on real quick well i think that i would say that um for many many years um fallout public schools has struggled to to attain 100 net school spending we've we've nickel and dimed everything we've we've we're so used to doing without right yeah and with all this additional funding we're actually able to um hopefully reduce class size hopefully um put more people in the classrooms in

schools to support um what's happening uh in each building we we knew that we needed to support buildings before we we're not adding administrative positions and patting at the top and saying okay we'll figure it out we know that the real help needs to happen in the classroom and and we have i think what this additional funding does is enables us to staff our buildings properly and you you've had a lot of challenges

because the city side didn't always provide 100 and you've talked about some of the expenditures you know a lot of bases you had to cover based on that not not hopefully we get to these levels i'm just just for people to so they know like what what are you going to do with this funding now does it just go wrong because you're getting money that you were owed like probably three fiscal

years ago so what do you do with it now what is it does it just go into something that so the pro so the problem with getting the money so late in the year and it's we understand we get it is that you keep you know first of all you don't want to build it you don't want to structurally hurt the city so you don't want to you don't want to you

want to do something that's one time so in most cases in most cases with the money we've used it on like to do the capital these capital items that you know i talked i just talked about previously so it that does two things one it take it relieves the city having to cover it later and two it keeps keeps our buildings current and keeps the stuff that we have in place

and the issue the other issue is you know as if we were to have it up front we could plan more accordingly for it and use it you know more wisely the problem with getting it so late we have to spend it so quickly on something we have plans already it's just good thank you i yield thank you thank you counselor and seat eight councilor pozo just curious with the additional

positions you're in the budget are you looking at redis redistricting some of the schools and where the kids would go no we're not looking at that right now i mean i i think that we're doing a pretty good job at putting kids in the neighborhood school i mean there are some exceptions depending on when students enroll if that if that school doesn't have spacing but we've gone through a major redistricting i

don't think that we are looking to do any major moves at this time okay so i'm just curious when i look at 66 parents 51 teachers i'm assuming there's a general plan of where they would go and right where what schools and what have bigger needs well uh up until now we haven't first grade doesn't have any pairs across the city so we want to that would that's one of our huge investments is to

put a power in every first grade class across the the city and kindergarten we had some kindergarten classes with a para and some in some schools they shared a para between if they have two between two classes and we are committing ourselves to saying we are going to have a parent in every single kindergarten full-time parent every single first grader full-time era in addition to that we also have the pre-k

paris that we're adding as well as you know you might have an inclusion classroom you need a full-time parent et cetera so that's a an investment that's it's going to be district-wide thank you i yield thank you conference iii council vice president i'm actually um gonna ask a question for a constituent i received a phone call last night and i told the person i can't answer the

question i have no jurisdiction over the school department i have nothing to do with their budget other than obviously on the city side we approve the funding what this individual was very concerned with was a pair of professionals which i'm really happy to hear that you're going to have a lot more in the classrooms because that is very important um their concern was apparently they go through your budget

quite well why under facilities was another assistant director hired at 75 000 but paris don't get raises i don't know how much i'm expecting you to address that but when you talk about everybody has a right to know where the money spent how that's when i made the decision i want to bring forward what constituents are thinking what they and what what they want to know and and you know make people aware that they

actually are going through your budget and um seeing the different line items yep and we are in the process of negotiating with all of our units including the paraprofessionals i i'll be the first to admit that you know they work hard they work hard and they deserve very very hard thank you with that i yield thank you anything further from the council anything nope anything from mr

mr almeida can you just clarify that the net school spending compliance slide sure where it shows 3.2 million yes and i think this is the case but correct me if i'm wrong that the 1.4 that's coming there's 800 000 to come but there was a million already paid to get to that number so it doesn't look like there's a gap of correct correct so i didn't include fy 22 in here just

because it's the budget year that we're currently in but so i just wanted to specifically speak about 21 so in relation to fy21 uh that 3.2 million dollars is made up of two components one is the 1.8 million dollars of prepaid tuitions and the other component is the 1.4 million that you're getting uh monday night for approval so with those two items with that item we'll meet our 21 target in addition to that

when we do the end of the airport they report out on the two years they report on the actual for the year that you just finished and they were which is 21 in this case and they report out on the budgeted year that you're currently in which is 20 when this case is fy22 so the city kicked in the 1.1 million dollars i believe you guys appropriated 1.1 million dollars in i have it here in november

and in addition to that we're still short 871 thousand dollars that 871 thousand dollars is attributed to the change in assessments for the charter schools the charter school assessments come came down but we still have to meet under school spending requirement and so the money has to divert back to us so that we meet our requirement so that's the additional funding that mr argy has referred to

so when you get to the budget july 1. so last year's budget i think the problem was it has to be 100 budgeted so if things happen in middle of july when the budget gets finalized that makes it not at a hundred percent that's when we're supposed to meet in august right away to correct some of these numbers we didn't do that for six months so that was part of the problem when

somebody asked the question of what do you do with the money if you get it late is because we did it we sat on it for six months without actually having the city come forward and say no we're we need to be budgeted at 100 you know when that number comes in the end of july so just planning ahead if that happens again the council should be asking the administration are you at 100 budgeted

now if not then that has to be adjusted earlier in my opinion at one of the meetings you talked about what do we do with the money and i was an advocate with the school committee trying to let people know that we have big expenses at the field uh the new fields at durfee there's a couple million dollars there you all have afforded us a bond for the baseball field but it doesn't take care of the

rest of the properties so i think a good use of one-time money like this otherwise we keep coming back to you so this is a good thing that the school committee administration have worked to say we're gonna spend some of this money so we're not just taking take and take and asking you to pay so we've done our fair share in a lot of ways so i don't want the council to look at it like well

we're pushing back on this transportation request because we want to be like greedy that's not the case at all we we put in a lot of money towards one time things that are going to prevent you from having to uh to do that there was a slide in here on the indirect cost yes that i asked that at a meeting staying the same as far as as far as i know you haven't

heard anything otherwise i have not so i think that's you know important to look at if if it's not changing so now we know what we have but my last comment is just in front of the council to thank mr almeida and mrs ponce for their work on the budget as you all know if you watch the meeting i was really frustrated with the one-line item piece and to their

credit they listened to the all of the school committee advocating for different positions and the like they came to the policy subcommittee with a different they listened so they listened they came to the subcommittee the proper way they're going to have a different policy before the full committee so that's how i think it worked we work together they actually listen so i want to give kudos to mrs

ponce for listening and everyone's asking about the what are we doing with the money they have good plans we're working on things and this is possibly the first one to tell you last year or two years ago we sat over there and said the we're doing great and everything else and it was an argument about whether the scores are flat superintendent ponce understands and owns the fact that we are not doing very

well on certain things and she's going to bust her butt along with her people and hold people accountable to get those results so i really am impressed by her work the budget and i thank you for your support with that at you thank you mr patrick's so i guess i'm going to just reiterate what mr aviar just said so to counselor lee's question about retention um i just want to look at for a second so the

superintendent had talked about what our values are and our values are really around supporting our students in the classroom and then supporting our kids in the classroom and i think those added positions the fact that a majority of them are really direct care for the kids so that way the teachers can get back to doing what they do best is reflective of all of that retention though like the issues that we

have with retention are definitely not limited to this district nor is it limited to districts like ours and i want to reiterate that because i think sometimes people hear oh you have such a retention issue in fall river nobody wants to work in fall river that's not the case so the more recent numbers and you know council proposal can probably attest to this are showing that about 51

of teachers across the country are not returning they're not coming back to this so when we're talking about retention this is a nationwide issue this isn't just a fall river issue but i think we've got folks in place that are really invested in creating a culture where people do want to be here and so i just want to you know again like give and if i don't if you don't mind i just

wanted to say i wasn't making it i know you look like a fall reversal only i was just asking what were we looking for to improve with our funding themselves and i know you weren't i was just expanding on that that it's not just a fall river thing and i do think that we have people in place that are really focused on making sure that the kids in our classrooms get the support they that

they need and that more the teachers are getting what they need so they can actually teach right so i again i just want to stress that i think we've got a group of people that are really trying to do what's in the best interest of our kids and what's in the best interests of our community and with that i yield thank you anything mr proposed concern yeah i'll i mean i'll echo that i'm an

educator sitting in this room so you and i talk the same lingo um it's definitely like mrs roderick said it's focused on the kids and that's what it needs to be um you know as as a principal myself i look at this and say it's the hands-on deck it's the teachers it's the paras it's the support staff that are in there helping those kids and at the end of the day they're all our kids so

i i echo what mr again said mr roderick said kudos to both of you a job well done thank you i yield thank you counselor anything further from the council anything further from the school committee madam clinton if you want to join your meeting

yes mr bailey mr harvey yes miss larabee miss pereira yes ms roberts yes motion to adjourn emotional journey made by councillor pozo seconded by cal security all those in favor

you