6.6.2022 Fall River City Council - Committee on Finance / Special Meeting

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council committee on finance will now come to order madam clerk council's kadeem here tamara here dion here kilby pelletier pereira here proposal here washington here president of liberty lebeau here president 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 item one is citizen's input first person signed up to speak is colin diaz five six president yes i'd like to say something before citizen input starts everyone gets three minutes i understand that if we're going to waive the rules for some you need to waive them for

everybody but the other thing is to come down and demean someone or call somebody a liar or do whatever is not acceptable it's time to talk about whatever the issue is that the individual wants to speak of i got calls from people i'm thinking that sometimes citizen input it becomes too personalized and it shouldn't be i agree with you and i must say i agree so with that i agree with you counselor but

we're also not censoring input we don't know what they're going to say and we don't have to waive the rules it's it's a case-by-case basis it's the will of the council we're not censoring anybody's rule but if somebody starts to demean someone i would hope that you would hit the gavel because it's not appropriate we don't want our children to bully and name call we don't expect our adults to be doing it as well

with that i yield thank you i'll make a comment in support of that i've received some calls as well from constituents and um i'm not going to say that at times it's an embarrassment i won't say that but i just did i guess but madam president i i hope that um and you will um if if it becomes uh you know defamation and personal attacks i'm not talking about you mr dice

if it becomes that i mean we should be talking about city business make your point and um no name calling so great i yield thank you thank you the subject is fy 23 budget mr dice you have three minutes thank you council president and um members of the city council and just getting into the budget um i just had a couple questions regarding some of the items on it

um i think we all know i sent the email beforehand uh i believe the mayor's office is on the agenda today and i think everyone knows now the mayor's office did personally use the city credit card to buy um 141 dollars in k-cups for the office i don't know if that was for an event i don't know that was just for the office however i don't think that is a proper use

of taxpayers monies especially when we have a five-year fiscal deficit in the future and um he also used the city credit card to pay for a ticket to a chamber of commerce meeting and if that's what the mayor thinks is a wise investment and i think he's privy to that however i think we constantly see a misuse of taxpayer money and now on the law department side they have over hundreds of thousands of

dollars in outside legal costs and my question is what is the point of hiring in-house attorneys if we're just going to spend even more i believe it was 400 000 i don't have the number in front of me on outside legal costs um that was just the two things i wanted to bring up on the budget um you know i've also through um in covet and coming to the meetings i've heard everyone come to

citizens input to the city council chambers and i like to applaud every single one of them i i didn't hear any name calling or um any disrespect and the only person i i've heard them call a liar is the mayor because he is he misled the city he said last year that the city was in great financial fiscal shape and how can you believe that when you have a five-year fiscal forecast of

deficits which he refuses to address the mayor is a liar there i said it that's within my privy to say because he is and i like to applaud everyone who comes down to citizens input and speaks their mind and holds this administration accountable which is the job of the city council it's a job of every resident if they believe in the transparent government and thank you for your time i appreciate it

next person signed up to speak is robert kamauer address 127 gangnam street the subject is whose budget and you already have three minutes mr quaran when you're ready you have three minutes okay thank you

madam president counselors uh i entitled my presentation who's whose budget because what you're looking at today is the mayor's budget what i'm here to to give you is a perspective of this of the citizens of a fall river because the universe i live in um in this particular time with inflation rampant a recession coming people being basically crippled um this is not the time to be looking at

some of the things that are in this budget i won't get specific because i can't right now but let me tell you the floor wherever i look at you can look at the statistics you know i come up here i will give you numbers the state the state household median income is 84 and change i'm not going to go because you can go from one source or another fall rivers is in the 40s per capita

income is 26 compared to 45.

our poverty level is over 18 percent the state average is nine percent we the general population in fall river is either poor or working poor now we know what's going to happen with these assessments of the houses and the taxes that are going to be burdened here i think kennedy took credit for i know they gave kennedy credit for saying you know you got to wait till the sun is

shining to fix the roof you don't fix it when it's raining i believe he probably paraphrased somebody just like he did with that's not what you can do for your country he paraphrased closure brawn and if you want to look it up it's in the book called the prophet uh but the reality is that now is the time to patch the roof not fix the people need a break the people of this city just can't

afford it we are going to be you're going to see people out in the street you know i represent the retirees i'm the president of municipal retirees association the median average of a retiree in the city of fall river is 22 000 22 000 subtract 5 000 from that for inflation figure out how many medications most of these people take and i know how many because they call me up almost every day with their problems

there's a time and place for everything this is the time for fiscal prudence this is the time for nothing new maintain a status quo and only put money into what we need this is a budget for the people the people are supposed to be delivered essential services 20 seconds so i i will leave you with a quote as i always though you can't tax your way to prosperity and also what uh what uh winston churchill said

if you stand in a bucket and try to lift yourself up you're not going to be successful so we can't do it we need the taxpayers need a break thank you thank you thank you next person signed up to speak is nelson vasquez addresses 210 sunset hill subject is common sense budget option we have three minutes dear members of the city council i come here today feeling yet again that our

city is not paying attention to the taxpayers in this critical time for fall river i've spoken numerous times about the need for our government to always keep the taxpayers best interest as our number one priority we've heard from homeowners in this chamber and by email about the financial storm that paul coogan refuses to acknowledge the fact that everyone except our mayor seems to know we are all in long-term

inflation with a deep recession to follow yet paul coogan's budget ignores not only what we are all experiencing at the gas pumps or in the grocery store and everywhere else what you have before you is a budget full of structural deficits huge pay raises and new positions paid for with one-time money this type of spending cannot be absorbed by the average florida citizen my solution is not to spend without

regard for the consequences and impact on our citizens my solution is a direct challenge to you paul coogan back on august 15 1971 to get a grasp on inflation during that time in our country president nixon issued an executive order that imposed a freeze on wages and prices to counter inflation this was the first time the us government had enacted wage and price control since world war ii the city of

forward is at a critical moment where not only the price for consumer goods is skyrocketing but the increasing cost of living here will be devastating to the most vulnerable in our city we need to take bold and decisive action to stop uncontrolled spending we need to tighten our belt and give our citizens some help and financial relief that is the only way to save our fixed low and average income citizens who for

the record make up the majority of our city i am challenging you mr mayor to do to do what president nixon did back on august 15 1971. i challenge you to initiate a moratorium on tax increases new positions and non-previously negotiated pay increases in this year's budget while this moratorium is in effect for one year the city of forward will operate on mostly last year's budget so that we can give our citizens

some shelter from the financial storm they face let's not forget that we will be facing structural deficits for years to come and the last thing we need as a city is a budget that will put us in deeper debt paul you know what's going on in our city you know that the most vulnerable can't continue paying for your spending spree with pay raises and water sewer rates piled on the amount of debt created by

inflation property taxes we must ask ourselves where will it end we just witnessed back on may 31st of this year at a sewer commission meeting where city residents complained about that storm water fee on camera the residents of forward need emergency relief that's why i'm here for the taxpayers advocating for a solution that has already been utilized in our country's history 20 seconds paul coogan

you know what's going to happen to the most vulnerable if you don't initiate what i'm advocating for here today developers have come and gone it's time for you to stand up for the people and and the duty of a government is to save its citizens from evictions foreclosures and bankruptcies thank you thank you madam clerk was there any submitted input there wasn't thank you next item on our agenda is the proposed

fiscal year 2023 municipal deposit budget presentation can the members of the administration come down

when you're all set up we just give your name and position for people at home that are watching

good evening i'm seth akin the city administrator bridget allman the director of financial services ed a capone financial consultant

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up i wish we had pictures of fall river on the screen we're going to that's not far no palm trees nothing i'm going to get the tech thing oh no just come on

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my damn finances now back in order

duplicate or extend

except now there we go

you want to make sure it's on duplicate you're trying to get the powerpoint

i apologize that we didn't have one prepared but they can be avoided

did you put it on presentation mode yeah and it's like that's still not the noise

okay so sorry for the delay are we all we're waiting no we're all set you can ride if you're all set so i wanted to thank the members of the council for allowing us to present today we're having a little few technical difficulties sorry about that um this is the presentation of the overview of the 23 city of fall river budget and we decided to go with a picture of durfee since it's

something to be really proud of and it just you know they were able to move in this year so thank you and then i want to kind of put this quote together coming together as a beginning keeping together as a progress working together as a success so a budget is a living document that will keep changing and i wanted to mention that all of the departments were met in a collaborative manner they met with ed and

at the time the city auditor to go over their budgets and make changes so i also one of the highlights is this budget is prepared to help the city's objective to provide excellence and service to the citizens and continue to move forward for long-term stability the department operational budgets were proposed with fiscal policies in place to maintain the stability one of the ways we're doing that is we're utilizing

our funds to investing one-time capital items this will alleviate the liability in the general operating fund this is helping us to invest to enhance our services at this time there is no surplus revenue budgeted no free cash budgeted and we are using half of the durfee debt exclusion it's in the main budget for fy 23.

this is a depiction of the debt exclusion as appearing in the fy 23 budget so this is an example of the median value so for example on a single family house the cost of the durfee debt payment at 100 of the debt exclusion would be 133 approximately and this is based on fy 22 values by using pulling out all of the capital items and using opera funding we're able to then

put half of the durfee debt payment in above the line which is bringing this down to about 65 dollars for a single family the budget is in quarter excuse me can you go back to that screen was that a year or a quarter i really couldn't see it that's a year yeah thank you so this budget is increasing 24.5 million dollars of which 18 million is in education tuna it's going up two and a half percent

of our tax base which is about 2.9 million the debt exclusion is 2.2 million 250 000 and we're estimating net new growth of 1.8 million there's approximately general state aid of 492 thousand dollars again the plan is to use half of the durfee debt payment to help alleviate the burden to taxpayers we have mandatory debt service payments of 13.9 19 13.9 million with an allocation of half of the durfee debt is

4.5 million for fy23 and we're using a phase in approach so part of this is to utilize these opera funds to prioritize decisions for good governance obviously we need to comply with all state and local ordinances we want to ensure transparency on utilizing these funds and we do not want to create structural deficits by kicking the can down the road and using operational using this for operational funds

we're trying to leverage opportunities and partnerships we're using all sources of our aid coordinating with our fema and grant resources and we're trying not to reinvent the wheel and we're looking at what other communities are doing as well as what didn't work well for them we're investing in long-term stability projects urgent health and economic needs and we're prioritizing short-term

investments that will give long-term benefits and fy22 approximately 2 million of stabilization funds were budgeted and 3.8 million of free cash budgeted this year no free cash or stabilization funds are budgeted we're doing a conservative approach to build reserves this is to hopefully help build stability for future years again estimating new growth of 1.8 million and i just wanted to point out

that this is captured over a 12-month period and fy 22 was presented with capture of a one-time use of 18 months our local receipts are level funded and we have union negotiations ongoing this is just a graph because everybody likes graphs to kind of show so our biggest pie of this is our obviously our education and then the next biggest resource to us is our real estate taxes this is right out of the budget and it

goes over our specifically our resources showing the total general fund resources our total enterprise fund resources and so the total available for appropriation is 374 million 976 691 dollars have a balanced budget of 374 million it's increasing about seven percent over the prior year general government education debt insurance and reserves is 324 million our education represents 48.2 percent of

our total general fund health insurance contributions represent 11.6 percent of general fund budget and retirement contributions represent 11.2 percent of general fund budget public safety represents 13 of the budget and our enterprise funds are 50.5 million which is a 1.3 percent year-over-year budget increase this is a little bit of our budget overview so general government is going up

three percent administrative services is increasing 10.4 percent which we can discuss the details of that when we get to that budget financial services is increasing 10.1 percent facility maintenance is a small decrease community maintenance as well as a small decrease the enterprise funds are just going up one point three percent education is increasing thirteen point two percent

in rev and public safety is increasing one point three percent insurance and other is increasing 0.8 and our retirement is going up 7.3 percent these budgetary increases are in line with rising inflation costs as we all see and the very sharp increase of escalation on capital items and our utility costs are significant factors that are driving this budget this is right out of our budget showing our overview of our

expenditures again it's a balanced budget and this is just showing a little bit more showing again that our education is about 48.2 percent of our budget and showing the next biggest increases are public safety retirement and this is just i want to kind of go over the stabilization fund so as you can see it was had decreased significantly 2017 and it's been a little you know coming

up a little bit and right now it's at 7.2 million so again utilizing opera money to help alleviate and help grow this to stabilize so that we can build this to a better level that can help us stabilize future increases and i just questions questions on the presentation counselor c3 council vice president dion good evening could you please go to your durfee slide madam president just point of order

so questions are just on the presentation right now just on the presentation then we're going to go to revenue in each department okay thank you thank you sarah's passing out a copy of the presentation

i think she meant that that exclusion i think oh i thought she wanted a pretty picture thank you thank you

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okay i guess my first question is when the taxpayers voted for the debt exclusion at the time the assessed value of homes was much lower than it is now at that time it was stated that it would be around 115 120 a year based on the home values then so the fact that the number would go up is concerning to me because to me the number should be going down you shouldn't be paying the same

amount for a hundred thousand you should be paying less per 100 000 so that we would be at the same payment as when the taxpayers voted for the new durfee my other concern is the fact that since this vote took place the tax factor also shifted to the benefit of the taxpayer which further should lower the payment so i have trouble believing that the payment should be 133 a year and that half of it is 65

um just based on those facts and and those numbers um at this point a single family we're looking at almost three hundred thousand versus 212 when this vote took place that changed to me that changes the numbers they shouldn't go up they should go down so that's my first comment um how explain to me how you're offsetting the debt exclusion when you say you're offsetting it so on the original submissions from

departments there was capital items put in there like they traditionally do in order to help balance this budget in order to help balance this budget those items were pulled out to use our opera money so they're not is sitting in the operational budget which allowed for us to move this up to keep the bat the budget balance okay so we're talking about capital improvement projects that qualify under

opera because i wasn't i wasn't aware that opera funding could be used for capital projects so capital like anything that's about that's worth something that will last more than a year so equipment purchases um the cameras for the police with some of the items that we've talked about on the app or money our items that were in the operational budget requests those have all been pulled out which allowed by

having another source pay for them it allowed us to be able to do this okay so that leads me to my next question would you say that you've reduced capital the capital item projects to zero we've reduced the capital item requests in the budget i believe that they're all pulled out yeah so just to clarify just just a little bit uh for example originally you had i think 16 million dollars of borrowing

requests alone in fiscal 23. so if i borrowed nothing the only thing you've proved as a council i believe is two msb projects for the school department if i request you right you've approved those to to advance but as far as any other borrowings at this point you haven't we haven't sent any borrowings of any kind and that's we all listen to the presentations on uh regional school so we're kind of being

very conservative the city administration is being very conservative about the approach to that the other is is for example anything that could be connected to the rules under abba i probably gotta learn how to pronounce it from boston obviously uh but my point is is that they're not just nitty gritty they're they're tied to anything that could be connected to uh covert uh related in in like for example

police cruisers is one uh and there are a lot of others that have been done originally if the council also remembers we were gonna we had to what you you had an appropriation under i think i'm not really sure now it might have been under covert funds of some kind a request of 360 000 we we found that that could be eligible that would have had that number would have had to be

put in the budget that we're going to pay for out of uh out of opera funds let's do the 10-year inspection and you've heard that before you know those details but that's just an example of you know to to keep things under control so that we could just look at operational expenses you know two things protect the stab fund review all of the capital needs for the city and see what's going to be eligible

you know that we can use maybe not every single thing is going to be eligible but so so that's where we're going just to get back to my question would you say would it be fair to say that you feel that you reduced capital improvement projects to zero i think so capital improvement projects versus capital expenditures i mean so there's equipment and a number of other things that i don't think are

necessarily just projects would you do all right cip the capital improvement program let's let's refer to it in the proper terminology cip capital improvement program have you reduced that to zero that's my question yes okay at this point and i'm going to tell you why i'm asking i'm going to tell you why i'm asking that question okay according to section 65 in the charter the mayor shall submit a capital

improvement program to the city council at least 180 days before the start of each fiscal year and then it tells you what that has to consist of and then when you go down to c which is adoption it states at any time after the public hearing but before march 1st the city council shall by resolution adopt the capital improvement program which may be amended provided that each amendment shall be voted on separately

and that any increase would have to uh to as submitted shall directly identify the method of financing to accomplish the proposed increase so it would be my contention according to the charter that you don't have the ability to reduce the cip to zero you would have to bring that to us and we'd have to go one line by one line and we would have to approve those deductions that's the reason i asked the question

and point my point point of information can i just just for clarifying purposes i think what the administration is talking about is that they reduced all the capital items that were in the operational budget that's correct you have not reduced the capital requests that would require other funding outside of the general fund right so there's still capital items that will be coming

before the council for bonding purposes that you've outlined correct yes yes okay all right i just needed clarification on that right thank you um let's see so on page three under proposed budget summary it shows indirects and in the 2022 budget revised and the 2023 budget that number is identical but if you go further into the budget there was actually an increase of 480 890 dollars in

indirects so that number actually should not be a zero percent increase it should be a six point nine percent increase could you reference the page what pages are you referencing again i'm on page three right now and on page 297 you'll see what i'm referencing in terms of indirect

indirect being the healthcare it went up i don't know if it was three one point three percent but actually if you if you add that four hundred and eighty thousand eight ninety two indirects your indirect actually went up six point nine percent page three and one page three is and then in 297 because health dental and life is an indirect and it's not there i apologize but i'm really i'm i'm not

following you all right you show your indirection six million nine nine thousand right in front of me right okay you're in in your indirects when we get further in which we're not discussing that but we are discussing the the proposal right it's four hundred and eighty thousand eight hundred and ninety dollars higher than what your indirect shows your indirect your your indirect should be

seven million four hundred and seventy thousand nine hundred and twenty six dollars according to that number which was so where are you getting that where are you getting that other number from from page 297.

297 i'll tell you in two seconds that would be health uh let's see um actually total transfer to employer trust seven million four hundred and eighty thousand eight hundred and ninety which is a one point three percent increase and then when you bring that over to the indirects and add the four hundred and eighty thousand eight hundred and ninety it brings it to a six point nine percent

yeah actually it doesn't they're actually two different things see the first health care are indirect yeah well indirect depends when you're looking at the group insurance appropriation and the indirects that you're looking at in revenue in this particular case are for water sewer and ems those were level funded because i believe that the indirects need a complete review once the fiscal year 22 needs to be for

those three enterprise funds needs a complete review and then adjustments will be made accordingly you know that you'll you'll you know after the after the budget process but that is listed under employee group that's true but some of that that you're looking at you're looking at page 297 right and if you run it down that is the indirect s so that 6.9 million dollars is the sewer water in the ems it directs add up to

that 6.9 the indirects that you're referring to that are on 297 have to do with health insurance correct indirects are partly health insurance that we charge back the enterprise funds for their percentage so where are those indirects reflected in this they're not they're well not in the way you mean we bring it see we bring some of it in as revenue and those pay for the indirects that you're looking at cover

retirement costs health insurance administration fees for processing you know payroll payables for those enterprise funds and it needs a complete review so at the end of fiscal 22 my recommendation has been that they run the actual reports and recalculate the indirects to make sure that they're that the city and the and the enterprise funds are being treated fairly so that's why you see that point of information just

to my colleague in c3 so the indirect costs you can actually find them on the appropriation orders under the various stabilization right um enterprise funds right individually you'll see them and then you just have to add them up so then that would bring me to if we're talking about the enterprise funds page nine under uh ems emergency medical service enterprise fund right and if you go to page nine

are you looking at the budget summary other though no the executive summary yes oh all right yeah appropriation order i'm sorry i have two i have two summaries oh okay the appropriation order page nine yeah it says be it ordered that the following fy 22 appropriation which is this clearly is not 22 this is 23. right so even if we consider that to be a a typo um it's the aggregate amounting to nine

million fifty thousand you see that appropriation but in actuality it's nine million six hundred and fifty one thousand so the appropriation is six hundred and one thousand dollars under what's necessary no what you're seeing in the em for example on page nine the ems what's coming out of indirect part of the indirect from ems it totals uh two million five thousand two million five

hundred sixty three thousand one hundred ninety five dollars that's what's being appropriated from they actually come in as transfers but really appropriating the money from the from those the enterprise fund and if you go to the water budget you'll see a same line item and the sewer budget you'll see those line items in those budgets for example the sewer you'll see indirect costs of one million

want to make sure that counseling c3 is getting yeah i don't want a response that she's looking for yeah i she wasn't she wasn't speaking to the indirect cause so she's she's looking at the appropriation so if you look at the yellow up top oh i'm so now she's looking at yeah there's the difference between the yellow up top and the total at the bottom of the page so she's looking to see where the difference is

so your appropriation is six hundred thousand dollars lower than what the enterprise fund requires it is that's unfortunate it is a typo because if you go to the if you look at the sewer it's 26 603 that particular one on is is a typo unfortunately so what's the real number what's that nine six nine nine six five one nine million six hundred fifty one thousand so the top needs to be changed

yeah so your appropriation needs to be changed change that yeah so in theory because if you go to the water you'll see the same thing for fiscal twenty i don't know how that happened fiscal 22 it says that you're right at the time yeah school 22. absolutely sometimes when you look at all these dates and you you just they just bounce right by it and actually while we're we're not there yet but while we're on

that subject of dates uh when you look at where the actuals should be um when you're looking at the revised budget from 22 and then it should save fy 22 through 331.22 it doesn't it says 331.21 so that's a year behind as well so those were kind of yeah and i i believe though i'm going to take a quick look i have in the back here the actual appropriation orders by the council to

see if the numbers are correct i'll take a look at it yeah i think we're going to have to like uh i mean the appropriation number has to match if it doesn't match that's right honestly the budget doesn't work so the next thing i'll go to is charts and graphs i have a real concern with this which would be page 19 and page 20.

so we have an employee count based on the 2022 fiscal year budget we don't we do not have a 2023 employee account i don't understand how we can build a budget on on uh on numbers from a year ago as opposed to now did you say page page 19.

it's under uh charts and graphs is the is the tab and if you get page 19 you'll see the employee account is based on 2022.

so that's showing historical i mean we can get an updated one for you as well okay so my question is how do you how do you create a budget not based on actual an actual employee account and my and and i'll tell you why i asked that if you look at police it shows 115 is the staffing level but it isn't the reality is the staffing level for the police department is 237.

so we're creating a budget with numbers that are completely off your your total number whether you're using historical numbers or not is 668.4 when our actual employee account is 778.9 so each department they reviewed their actual staffing levels when they prepared their budgets this is just a graph showing the historical but we will get you i can get you an update for fy23 yeah traditionally

whatever the fiscal year is the budget that we're going through it's here okay traditionally so that's that's rather concerning that we don't have the numbers um to go along with the budget and you you know it makes again you know what what's the budget based on if you're basing it on on um it's way off so that particular chart isn't used to prepare the budget that's just for informational purposes every

single department went through their own their own employee yeah because the police department's budget is based on 237 okay see i only have a couple more things here page 44.

let's see okay we've that that's the debt exclusion that we kind of touched on um yeah i'm still concerned with that i still think that number's high and um is there any are there any plans at this point i know we had this discussion before but i think we have to need to have the discussion again to break that number out on people's tax bills um because it obviously depending on the value of your

home everybody has a different dollar amount they'll be paying i think everybody's entitled to know exactly what they're paying towards the debt exclusion because that number is specifically for the high school and we can tell i can talk to the assessor's office about the ability to break that out on their bills i know that in the past uh it was said you know that's not a huge deal it might

take a little bit of time but it can be done and i think for the taxpayers purposes it really should be done um i want to know what the difference is between the taxes i'm paying on my home and how much i'm paying for high school and down the down the road we're going to have the diamond school and i think people need to know um what these what is costing them and what they're

paying for each thing um let's see i think i only have one more thing at the moment okay oh no we're not in this yet i'm sorry i was gonna jump to a category all right that's all i have right now thank you i yield thank you counselor at c4 council kelpie yes um just to piggyback on counselor dion's point um i think that should be reasonably easy to do to calculate

from the assessor's office how much the increase is and i agree with her i think people have a right to know we just purchased the pay patriot about what 360 thousand dollars um that's not that's not the software the 360 000 is for the um to do the new the new values to go around for the evaluation okay but we're still paying patriot yes okay which is very very efficient as you must know a

very efficient company so let me that's not a difficult task not a difficult task if you don't mind my only concerned counselors is that and for councillor dion that i'm not aware of too many communities i'm not aware of any communities in mass that under a debt exclusion has put a separate line on their tax bill i mean this would need some research and probably talk some conversation with the

department of local services to see you know whether or not it's an issue or not an issue well you know because they approve the format of the tax code so yeah no i know property values yeah and uh percent of increase yeah hey so i don't think on the surface it sounds you know like easy it is a it is a programming change i mean you're gonna the request would have to be put in

very soon if you were gonna plan on reprogramming that and a conversation to be had with the department of local services they do have approval over your tax bill you know that you do send out but i'm not aware of of communities that i'm aware of uh you know that have you know that have put it out as a separate line item maybe the cost of your team couldn't eleven you know i'm not aware

thank you anything further on the presentation yeah can i i just want to make a point um you know i think it's similar to our water bill on the water bill you have a base base fee you have a meter fee you have the water usage you have so to me it's just the same uh it just goes along the same line yeah i mean years ago they used to put out a

tax bill that had a city tax rate and a school tax rate right that old and uh the uh you know they did away with that through the commonwealth they stopped requiring cities and towns to break out the school rate and the uh and the general government rate hmm i just yeah i just think that i just think that that exclusion is a little bit different than that it's it's something that people voted for and

they're just just my feeling and myself as a taxpayer i just feel people have the right to to look at their bill and and know what the dollar amount represents that they voted for thank you with that i yield concern c4 yeah i'll be done after this uh forgive me for speaking not only i'm out of turn um but uh that i think that was the promise made to the citizens of fall river it

was that that that was going to happen that that cost was going to be um in the tax bill just like your rain water tax icpa like the cp community preservation tax yeah exactly anything further on the presentation thank you thank you if the administration would like to go through the revenue

yeah so i mean the revenue is pretty straightforward most of it comes off of the cherry sheet at this point local receipts have been level funded again we're not using the page wheel we're on page three

hmm

so again you can see that there's no budgeted use of free cash we're trying to protect the stabilization fund and most of our other resources um again are being it's adjusted about 7.3 but the major increase of this is our education revenues that's probably one of the largest i think i don't before my time of education in greece so i don't know if anybody has any specific questions on any of the the

revenue items counseling one casa kadeem thank you madam president so just in terms of revenue and i i think i may know the answer but the debt exclusion that you would be looking at would be so we have a debt exclusion the amount of 2 million 250 000 right so that's assuming that's 50 percent so if we multiply that by 2 that's going to be the total amount that we would be looking if we had not

had the opera money right to cover capital costs yeah i mean so the council and c3's original question we've reduced the assumption would be that we reduced roughly 2.2 million dollars in capital items that were built into the general fund right so i think that's the line of questioning she was getting at the theory behind it is is to try to keep the money in the stab fund until it's you know until you need to play

these cards out especially where you do have this uh diamond uh project coming on you at some point in time i mean i think you need to do a lot of planning in the next couple of years no and i recognize that but i think the statement was that opera you know when we go back to the presentation the oppo money uh was saving 50 of the debt payment so

total for the year if opera was not an option we would be looking at 5.5 million dollars right in the debt exclusion item under the real estate tax 4.5 i mean i'm sorry four point five four sorry yeah i was just throwing additional dollars there is another piece down coming down the road i mean and that's the rest of the bar guys not using my fingers but is that yeah and so i think also i mean

we do need to look at there's been the city relies heavily on debt and bonding and i think we need to be very mindful and conservative because we do have diamond coming on in a couple of years and that's a significant payment so if we can protect it now by using the the app on the opera money this is like all these acronyms um i think that would be the smartest move for us to make i

mean putting in half right now is a way to help reduce some of the burden to taxpayers but i think by pulling out those capital items and not using stabilization money and not using free cash and utilizing you know the 70 million dollars and then plus the bristol county money i think it's the smartest thing i think that's and most of that's what most of the towns are doing the towns

that are going to use it for operational expenditures they're going to have problems down the road you're literally just kicking the can down the road yeah and i'm not talking about i'm not trying to get into a philosophical debate as to whether or not i agree with it i'm just trying to figure out that that's if we didn't have opera we would be looking at the debt exclusion for the

new high school at 4.5 million correct correct so that's in there so you'll be looking at the full 100 of what we presented so going through the budget we have essentially removed 2.25 million dollars worth of capital items that were built into the general fund yes yeah okay and then the uh just looking at the real estate so page 43 i'm looking at um because i know it kind of appears on multiple pages but

the revised fy 22 budget for the real estate taxes was that that incorporates the tax recap i would assume is there and i know this is just a it's really only 35 000 but just the prior year base so if i look at fy23 um so the prior year base is higher than what the prior year base really was so if i'm looking at the prior year based on fy 22 under real estate 117 800 287

and then you've got a prior year based on the fy 23 and the numbers should tie out 117 835 yeah the uh 118 the department of uh i'd say was the department of revenue for some reason i took that right off the uh the uh sheet that they send down you know for the levy limit yep and uh for some reason they they increased uh you know the the amount and

to me it was it wasn't worth the you know for 30 for the 35 000 and it didn't make sense to go back and try to do a you know a complete review of 22. okay i mean but that's just that's being pulled off of yeah okay so pull a number that number came right off of the certified sheet right from the department of revenue so somewhere along the line there must have been either under

on 22 and a correction was made when they when they sent the sheet down to the city because that's the first thing you try to do is right make sure they're using the right certified number okay and then on page 44 just i know you talked about local receipts so essentially local receipts um level funding so you're not really seeing any any increase whatsoever i guess that's a little bit of a concern um just trying

to figure out what we're doing to generate revenues uh just have we and and i'm all for being conservative um is that really what we're seeing though we're seeing a flat line in in local receipts now because my main concern was verifying you know obviously motor vehicle excise is always concerning because yep you know you budgeted and then you're hoping you get the right number of commitments as you

collect right now they're running good well you know we're covering that yeah and i also the other one was so do you know before you go in just because i was going to ask you that's one of the questions so do you know where we are with the the actuals with the commitment that we got i want to say it was like 8.3 or in that range so i mean and you

know we still get the rest of june to collect right we had an additional commitment that we were able to collect and uh the other one that is really was really concerning to me and i believe it was counselor dion that brought it up to me about marijuana that one skittled me a little bit because when i when she mentioned in the corner of the quarterly reports that when i looked at the

revenue i said holy cow but i did do a do i have an analysis done on that and we seem to be doing we seem to be right on target and probably come in a little bit stronger we didn't build in uh revenues for uh i believe we're bringing on two more we got four and five but i didn't really want to get too far ahead of myself because it takes time to actually see

that revenue coming in so for the for the marijuana the cannabis portion for the sales tax we're at the 1.65 is that yes and then so we would see another 1.65 for the impact fees what about so and the only reason i asked because i feel like we're leaving money on the table for the meals and room tax so um i just pulled a report for what we've got for the three quarters uh for meals

um so we already received 1.2 million dollars so it looks like we're averaging you know roughly 400 000 per quarter so we'd be at 1.6 million dollars so that's 400 000 um and again if we don't need the revenue that's that's one thing but you know it will come in certified free cash but the other one is is the males tax as well you know we've got budget in there 12 000 we're already at 96 000

for the three quarters so looking at roughly 125 000 um for the year so this this report that i actually ran today had run uh shows uh meals tax and that doesn't include the uh we more that come in we were at about 1 million to 11. right so you can see we had budgeted 1 million 250 well i didn't budget it but in 22 there was 1 million 250 budgeted so we're right we're pretty

much on target so far yeah i guess if if we get that that was only three quarters so we got one more you got another 400 thousand dollars roughly to come in so that's that gives you i guess we're leaving 400 000 on the table but then if you look at the the rooms the room tax the hotel tax so we've got budget at twelve thousand we've already received ninety six thousand

um so if you're just looking at what you're looking on a quarterly basis that'd be roughly 125 000 for the year so we're leaving at least a hundred thousand dollars so between the two of them you know half a million dollars on the table for for revenue i'm not i mean this is i'm not trying to be but not having the staffing of the ability to actually go back and try to review every category

on fiscal 22 it's a conservative approach to local receipts because obviously as you know if the city collects more revenue at the end of 22 it would theoretically be more money we can turn back into uh free cash into free cash and also you could always before the tax rate is set leave yourself a little wiggle room if for some reason we needed to needed some money we can adjust it

for one other quick thing if you don't mind bridget the uh in the in the projections for the state aid bridget used the house version we did not use the senate version we're hoping and anticipating a lot not a lot more additional money coming in through the uh through the conference committee of the house and the senate and uh which is a good thing okay and then just in terms of so two more

questions um so the capital items before we started really getting into it i had a i had a question here with regard to do we have a list of the capital lms that we pulled out that we can see um what exactly the 2.2 million dollars 2.25 um but along with that i don't want to just present a list sort of in a vacuum uh one of the things we're doing is is

talking to each department head we've already started doing that uh in order to submit essentially a revised five-year capital plan that shows what was pulled out that shows what the priorities are going forward and gives the council the best uh most current uh picture of what that would look like in the context of the five years as well as the priorities set by the departments yeah and that's fine i guess i was just

looking to almost check and balance just in terms of the 2.25 million dollars um you know we're saying we're using opera money so that we just have some documentation and say okay this is the 2.5 it incorporates tasers you know five police vehicles uh whatever dpw is looking for equipment whatever the case may be that was that was originally requested and built in um that may be above the capital

improvement because i don't i don't know if you captured it in the in the actual cip um if it was so it could have been above what was in those items right and again we've we've met with um most of the departments the i mean obviously the biggest police fire um no i'm used to calling it dbw but we call it something else here community maintenance yeah so and we're they're all reviewing those

requests and we're going to be setting up quarterly meetings but we've been meeting and we have meetings scheduled over the next couple weeks again because you know the world is changing rapidly as we every day with so they're reviewing theirs um in a much more detailed manner and coming back to us with it my last question with regards to revenue um and since mr capone is sitting at the

table i might direct it to him i think i asked this question every single year and for some strange reason that dementia must be kicking in because i can never remember what the response is so payment in lieu of taxes the um dartmouth so it was zeroed out last year um zeroed out this year again but i dartmouth paid for the lovely ponds that are located in the in the town of

dartmouth so we usually get payment in lieu of taxes since we own the uh the ponds and they utilize it why is there no is it because ed's a financial consultant or that's a that's a joke i don't want anybody to run with that we'll have a citizen input statement but why why is there no uh pilot being uh paid to the to the city from the town what page are you on oh

i'm sorry page 48.

so there are several towns that are located in the town of dartmouth that are owned by the the city of far river so there's 450 are we payment of taxes there's 450 000 in the budget but that's for the housing authority right housing yeah academy and so the academy of building they didn't get any in 22. so no i know that's thinking maybe they weren't going to get any in 23.

so i'm just curious and i and i forget what the response was but i i don't if we can i guess if we can look at why dartmouth's not paying us a good point but but i believe if i recall because of all the issues of lake noka joke yeah you folks are still using the ponds i see the boats on the ponds every time i drive by reed road and stuff like that

so right it's not for swimming though no i know that yeah very late focus i just want to make sure we get i got fair fair taxes that's all from the town of dartmouth we'll look into it perfect how you thank you just want to ask something to attorney um atkins the 2.2 million that we're pulling out using opera money to pull out of the budget on the capitol does that mean that

we're not looking because i thought there was talk of taking 2.2 million from the school department has that been next i thought it should have been but that conversation is is still ongoing i don't actually i don't think i'm able to give you an answer on that right now okay um i think at this point in rather than trying to speculate as to what might happen uh without knowing for sure uh

we're looking at uh trying to use arpa money as much as we possibly can for those capital costs but if you're using the opera money to cut down on capital issues of capital things that you buy and you can reduce the debt by 50 percent so it's 65 for a single family if it's 271 value why would you want to get another 2.2 off the school department so so i think that um

at the end of the day as great as it is to try to deliver a balanced budget um it doesn't necessarily mean that uh you know the city is um i know that that folks in the audience and other folks have used the term flush that's never something that the mayor ever said never something anyone at this table ever said um and uh because it's just it's not where we are

at the very end of the day we are trying everything we can do to spend within our means um and uh essentially spend the revenue that we have and so if there is uh significant additional funds that the school has um that can be used for the benefit of the city um that's a conversation that is going to be had but it's certainly not any sort of presumption on the part of the city that uh

that that's going to happen so i know that conversation is ongoing i can't really speculate as to what the outcome is going to be and some of the money in the water department after meeting today with the governor and the lieutenant governor meeting them at millstone medical and the nine million dollars that's coming from the state if it passes in the house and senate um to do a lot of that infrastructure work also

will be able to offset some of what monies we would look at spending certainly call your local legislative delegation and push for that vote because we could use the nine million it's important without a yield thank you thank you thank you anything on revenue counselor and c3 council vice president yeah i just have one more question on page four under reserve if there's 2.6 million dollars in a reserved fund can you

explain what that money is for where it's going what the information is so the reserve so as you know we have union negotiations ongoing so there's funds budgeted in reserves for those union negotiations okay so none of those funds are going to go towards creating new positions any raises or anything like that strictly well yeah above and beyond above and beyond your negotiations i those are contractual raises

so like in other words there there's there's four at least four people in this budget that that are getting raises this year so none of that money is going towards those raises is my question no so what's in the reserves is for the contract negotiations for union employees okay and nothing to create new positions not in the reserves no okay thank you with that i yield thank you anything further on revenue no let's go

you we'll start the departments with general government great okay so drawing your attention uh to page 79 in the budget beginning with the mayor's office you can see that overall it's a 1.4 increase that increase is largely comprised actually exclusively comprised of some small raises for some personnel in the budget um there are of course four people in the mayor's office um and if you were to compare 22

to 23 there's a small increase for both the chief of staff and the special projects and media coordinator there is a different admin assistant in that position than there was in fy 22 and she is an afscme employee um so her uh salary is set by uh her step uh within askme does anyone have any questions about the mayor's budget no president can i just quickly um i've got a lot of questions

with regards to salary but if i can just get a quick update from the administration i think it might alleviate some of my questions can you just tell us which collective bargaining agreements are set to expire um and because except some of my questions is there i don't see any raises for certain groups so ask me so i would assume that ask me is either expired or you're in the process of a successor agreement so can

you just talk to those unions the only cba that is set to expire at the end of this fiscal year's ems we actually do have an agreement with ems and so there will be no you know back backtracking the rest of the agreements have expired and we're now essentially working without a contract with the majority actually with all of those those when i say all of those what i'm talking about

are police superiors police patrol fire afscme teamsters and then there's two custodians in law and so with regard to agreements with that we have an agreement in principle but we either don't have a formal agreement voted on by the body or i haven't received it yet in order to submit it to the council those would be police superiors afscme law and ems the agreements that are still in the

midst of negotiation are teamsters police patrol and fire i believe that we are likely to have an agreement with patrol and with teamsters certainly not before the end of the fiscal year uh but soon because negotiations are ongoing and they're productive uh with regard to fire we have recently started up negotiations again uh because we believe that that at some point that would maybe go to arbitration but i

believe that there is a way forward um and uh i'm very hopeful that we can have some meaningful conversations in the next several weeks um so that's where we are um thank you i apologize for interrupting so with regard to um at least three you know the mayor the chief of staff and the special projects they are non-union employees the administrative assistant is a union employee um does anyone have any questions with

regard to the mayor's budget counselor and seat six council prayer yeah um i see on the chief of staff there's a cpi but that's in the contract that she get the cpi so that's not a raise per se that's correct it's just part of what is in the contract but that brings me to a question of the ordinances that we have and what salaries people make if unions have gotten increases sometimes

people within those departments in various positions also get a cost of living or a one percent what have you um has that been settled yet uh so that our ordinances are reflective of what people's salaries are as the ordinance committee has completed that so the ordinance committee has before it a whole number of of things that will affect uh exactly what you're talking about counselor uh there's of

course the proposed reorganization and along with that or the creation of several positions and then perhaps more importantly and more broadly there are a number of positions that simply because of cost of living increases have already gone over ordinance and so the effort there of course is to have uh the positions back into ordinance by increasing what the maximum dollar amounts would be for each of

those so there's a whole list of positions that at this point that people are being paid outside of ordinance simply because of cola increases and what i expect and hope will happen is that once we've resolved uh those four things the several new positions um not really new positions sort of re-tread positions under the reorg the reorg and the positions that are out of ordinance everything will be uh

consistent again yeah but we're not even close to riyadh yet so i just i i just think that you know if we have ordinances on the books just like we have a charter whether i agree with everything in the chat or not you have to follow it so i feel the same way about an ordinance you expect people to abide by the ordinances of the city and if we as a body and not

making sure that the ordinances are within you know all of the um whatever the payments is i see that as a problem so maybe that can be worked on but um that's the question i have i thought some of those had been done um that's it i don't have any other questions tony akin can you just clarify if i'm looking at the fiscal 22 under the mayor's office so those four positions the annual salary for

the total for fiscal 22 wouldn't that be the starting column in 23 no no so um in fy 22 uh the total for salaries uh and wages along with uh longevity for one employee holiday um and uh there were other personnel costs um i'm actually i didn't look at that to see what that was in 22 but the difference between the 288 345 and 292 holiday right and 23. is um i believe that there was

we made up we would have started 23 with uh the cola for some folks already haven't been awarded several months ago um so the bottom of two of the fy 22 doesn't necessarily have to be the start of the fy 23 uh line item or column individually they wouldn't be the same so for instance for special projects media the end of 22 was 38 296.

it's starting 23 at 42 000.

it's a four thousand dollar raise it is a four thousand dollar raise um i don't know what the timeline is of negotiations between uh the mayor and the members of his staff uh i just know that that's the uh the intent for 2012 for fy23 uh is to bring up uh ms pavilion all right and would that be the same um so the chief of staff position ended 22 85 292 yes and it's starting at 87

131 87 131 plus cpi and holiday and holiday okay so we're bringing it to 88 445.

point of information that's a 3 106 dollar raise which one are you talking about chief of staff which is an ordinance still which we had changed i'll wait till it's my turn to speak counselor at state three council vice president um at an ordinance meeting when we were discussing the um ordinances i had brought up the fact that there were certain positions two of which are in the mayor's um

line item for salaries that theoretically are political positions the mayors come the mayor's go and the mayors come and go so does the chief of staff so does the specialist project media person presumably on occasion it's duplicated but generally so it was my contention that those positions should just be offered at a number you want the position you don't want the position because it's not a lifetime

career it's not like other people who have worked in this city for 15 20 25 years so they anticipate raises they anticipate i don't know anybody that's been that's there's people that have worked here for probably 20 years who don't get a 4 000 raise so i don't believe it's equitable i don't believe it's fair um and it's just not something that um personally i can go along with and we had that discussion

and ordinance last year the other thing is in terms of people being paid outside of ordinance i could be incorrect but i believe we also had that discussion last year i would have to defer to corporation council on this one but i believe the consensus was you cannot pay people outside of ordinance whether their salary has increased to that level or not you have to stay with an ordinance

you can't pay them outside of ordinance you can't pay them more money than what's allowed and if that is what's happening that's a problem that we need to fix with that i yield well i do think that um uh hr director mcelini one of the first things he did was was go through and find out where those problems exist and that was the effort uh that's in front of ordinance right now is to fix that and

revenue um so i think we're you know certainly haven't been sitting on our hands uh doing this we've been uh trying to no i'm not implying that you are my what i'm saying is as long they have to the salaries have to stand the pace have to stay within ordinance until something changes um and part of the argument was we're forever changing ordinances to accommodate a situation instead of the

situation staying within ordinance until ordinances change you know that's like saying well maybe next month the the the state's going to change the speed limit to 75 so i can go 75 miles an hour now because it's going to change the law is the law that's the only analogy i can come up with off the top of my head so i think that's where i'm going i'm not saying you're not attempting or trying or

it's just it is what it is and we have to work within the confines of the parameters with that i yield thank you attorney aiken are there any other questions regarding the mayor's budget moving on to um the city corks budget you can see a small reduction in total salaries of 0.7 percent and a total reduction of 0.1 percent uh in the city where the majority of costs remain the same

there is an increase in equipment and maintenance regarding the time clock just essentially an upgrade in the time clock and an id maker which comprises an increase of about two thousand dollars the rest of it there are no really significant changes um does anyone have any questions regarding the course budget counseling thank you just so uh in terms of so this is the first department so um i'm assuming that well i

i'm not assuming i know the clerks in this are ask me unit so we're going through whatever um the cost of living adjustment that's agreed to and then comes down to the to the council are the is the city clerk an assistant clerk because i don't see any cost of living adjustments for them are we anticipating to follow suit what we've always done in terms of department heads um who might

not be on a contract that might outline a cost of living adjustment are they going to receive the same cost of living adjustment that aspie's receiving from what i understand and as you know my history with the city is not long at this point from what i understand even where a cost of living adjustment may not be articulated in a contract the majority of folks end up getting a consistent cost of living adjustment

with the afscme contract and the aspie contract is the one that seems to control we're doing everything we can to actually have a consistent cost of living living scheme across three years for all contracts so that there's no inequity between unions okay so i did ask um because we're actually working on what that cost would be for the retros and they did tell me that the past practice has been to do that

yeah so i i just wanted to make sure i didn't want to assume so and and i actually did have a question with regards to the reserve fund but uh counseling c3 asked it in in the revenue portion which so i'm satisfied there so i guess just to kind of circle back a little bit so that was for collective bargaining agreements and i would assume non-contractual or contractual individuals that would follow

a cba that's the idea okay all right and then uh my only other question was and i had the you know office equipment furniture maintenance line highlighted the time clock is it just a time stamp time clock or is it an employee time clock what are we what are we talking about there so i think it's time stamping documents okay so and that comes with the service agreement so it's not just

the employees i've seen it first and i just thinking about employees no it's i mean as you know it's critically important that when documents come in they'd be time stamps similar to the court corps office or anywhere else i yield thank you thank you any other questions with regard to the clerk's office okay drawing your attention to page 87 in your budget this is the city council office

um the thing i would draw your attention to uh is in the salaries column for fy23 we do have a proposed anticipated buyout one of the clerks is anticipating possible likely retirement uh sometime in the middle of the fiscal year so that 22 000 there represents the compulsory buyout that goes with that aside from that the costs are largely the same does anyone have any questions with regard to the city council office

nope turning your attention to page 91 of the budget the elections and for some of these if there are questions i believe we have some of the department heads here especially where the departments you know either have undergone change or there may be some specific questions regarding operational expenses that i'm i'm not as intimately familiar with as i'd like to be so with regard to this one the most

important thing to note in the elections is that we're looking at the cost of two elections as well as early voting for two elections so that constitutes the 20 000 increase in professional salaries in order to sustain the cost of of that i believe there's also just a modest increase in building rentals for polling locations does anyone have any questions with regard to elections six council pereira

um with uh mr lyons taking over where um miss suzy young was is there's gonna be a vacant position here i know you have a senior aide but we also have the senior clerk is there looking at doing an extra hire there yes so from what i understand ms mello has moved up to mr lyon's position mr lyons is now the election commissioner uh and they are in the process of posting and

attempting to hire for the position that was ms mello's position okay i had concern about that and also to look at um where they're going to have elections polling places because everybody seems to be charging more um and i don't know if more schools could be utilized um as they are all over the city and maybe that would be beneficial or parking i know last time the laterno school

there was a little bit of a snag of how people went in and so um i do have confidence in mr lyons and i'm sure he'll go around and check all these places and get us the best deal possible with that i yield thank you thank you counselor and c3 council vice president yeah i was asking a good ass about the vacancies as well so they'll have a compliment of four people or they're gonna have three

um i believe that they will have um yeah yeah it'll be four it'll be four okay thank you with that i yield thank you any other questions with regard to elections no race for the council right i'm sorry no raise for the council right okay how much do you want no we gave that up at night okay uh drawing your attention to page concert seat one cause kadeem did you

you said the ftes would be four is that what you said no it's three full time and that's that's right three full time in one parking senior okay three and a half arguments four people yeah okay drawing your attention to page 97 this is the veterans budget so this one is is important uh there's a couple of things i'd like to ask you to take a closer look at before we get into it

on page 97 you'll notice that um in the last major grouping where it shows uh no funding for fy 22 and additional funds for fy23 uh that begins with training education is everyone uh oriented to where i'm i'm saying training in education training and education so first let me say that the training education line item and i can't believe we missed this was supposed to be 2500 25 000 is what came out which is a

really significant difference um perhaps even more importantly uh many of the line items beginning with training education and going down um all the way to um the flags before we get to pine street those were made part of the grouping that's just above it so dues and memberships down to aid for veterans this budget if you look at fy 22 had many fewer line items and so although it may look like these are new

expenses they are not they are actually expenses that were pulled out of other line items in order to create additional transparency and clarity for the council to understand where the money's going i'll also note that in fy 21 the aid to veterans was approximately 1.8 million dollars and fy 22 went down uh by approximately a hundred thousand dollars to 1.754 million and the proposed for uh fy23 is

1.566 million dollars now there's a number of reasons why there's a reduction in the number of veterans and the amount of aid that is going to veterans and because i think it's easy to look at that and say geez why are we doing less um and so there's there's there's three issues here um the first is that there are a number of veterans that during um uh kovid were uh receiving uncovered

unemployment that was uh significantly higher than it otherwise would have been and then took them out of the threshold for um for receiving chapter 115 benefits there was also a cola increase in social security that also increased and would have taken some of them and i'm not saying this is a widespread thing but this is this is a factor for a number of veterans the coal increase to social

security took some also out of the threshold for chapter 115 benefits and then there also are unfortunately more veterans passing away when you consider that our world war ii veterans could be in their late 90s up to 100 plus years old our korean war veterans i figure in 1950 would be in their late 80s possibly early 90s it's really our vietnam veterans that we're servicing uh the most

so it does seem that every year there are fewer veterans and again that doesn't tell the entire story but it is something that needs to be considered i'd also ask you to consider that in addition to a number of line items beginning with training education um really being sort of re-you know indicated redescribed costs that were in previous budgets but but not in the same way and they're not new expenses

i'd also ask you to consider that there are um a number of increases that basically show a recognition of costs that the veteran's office does incur that may not have been accounted for and i think the most important one is the dpw overtime there's an acknowledgement there that there's a significant amount of work that dpw does to support whether it's parades or other events uh preparation of different um venues

uh and so the vso is is attempting to anticipate uh that those are real costs uh to the city the same stuff counselor and seat five council per hour are you all sad i am some of the stuff you're saying i have issue with certainly you know i work with the veterans very very closely and i am a liaison with the war veterans council and and from the city council

when you talk about a number of veterans that you know if they got a little bit of an increase or whatever that then they couldn't pick up on the other end let me tell you that the state said the state sent something down that if you had a veteran living in housing for example the vso could cut a check to housing pay that housing bill and then the additional from the chapter

115 money the additional money would be money that they would claim if they went down for public assistance and it would make them eligible for other things all of a sudden now they don't want to pay that they only want to write one check to the veteran and it hurts that veteran for later on and the other thing that you talked about with dpw dpw and i believe tammy was here she still is

dpw was always paid through the veterans office and it was an expense because quite frankly the the um invoice has to come in from mrs nitino from tammy that has to come in and then the city would reimburse it comes in to the office and they reimburse with the city so those two there are off i i don't like a lot of what i see on this budget i think things have changed when i look at

the trainings you spoke about trainings that it's not twenty five thousand it's two thousand five hundred the state reimburses for training there are some mandatory trainings that you go to one is in leominster one is in the cape the hell twice a year and the state reimburses the city for hotel for food for room for travel it's a hundred percent reimbursed on here you have an investigative position there is no

investigator years ago you did have an investigative position where someone would go to that veterans home who was unable to come into city hall you would go to their home and you would help them fill out forms however there were issues throughout the state where people would say veterans would say they came here to take information my medication is missing or something was stolen from the house or

there was something inappropriately done or said so the state stopped that so now you have the investigator who is a head clerk investigator you basically take calls over the phone um but the position still exists it doesn't exist who has it look and see who has it the position the position exists but it's vacant at this point but you don't need it so get rid of it you don't need it if an investigator is

not going to go there you have a head clerk investigator that's vacant correct correct the head clerk investigator is a vacant position but you don't need it because you're no longer doing investigation and on here on page 96 you have head administrative clerk investigator senior account medical clerk senior account clerk head clerk investigator again but if you look at what the physicians are here

uh the head clerk investigated that that could be uh mrs mata perhaps she does it she's the head clerk investigator now if there's something so the head clerk investigator a salary of 38 000 seven there and eighty plus a travel allowance of one thousand five hundred and sixty plus the holiday you have forty thousand dollars there take it out because you're not going to hire anybody

to ever go do investigations and go to someone's home the state kind of stopped that call and talked to uh miss poppy up at the state they they don't do that anymore um some of the things that are there i mean the training i thought was crazy ten thousand dollars for outreach outreach was this that miss brittle gave to us this for outreach this the secretary of state galvin pays for that book this here

veterans service office they mail these out to people or send these to people in this and a lanyard in that ten thousand dollars but my veterans didn't get quarters this year this pen doesn't even say the city of fall river where are we handing these out friday saturday sunday monday i would i was at every veteran event i never saw any of this stuff being handed out to me

it's a waste of money we have a print shop downstairs they could be printing things flags on here for flags what's the amount for flags 25 000 for flags yes you know how much the flags are 70 cents a piece you know how many we buy about 7 000 how many flags we buying or are you getting flags somewhere else we buy about 10 000 flags at 70 cents a piece 7 000

so what's that there for another one here was the monuments we worked our tail off on this council even the council president other members of the council we worked our tail off to get money for the vet center are you talking about the pine street the fun match or pine street we we did money for that we also fought for money to redo many of the monuments in the city you

don't have monuments in the city and they fall apart the civil war monument we have to do casting there's all kinds of stuff we have to do plus to keep up with iwo jima to keep up with the vietnam wall monument we had money to do that we even took money last year remember and we put it towards the monument how much do we have there for monuments

it went from 75 000 this year to 25 000.

why are you cutting on the monuments we're a city that's known for taking care of our veterans we have a veterans bicentennial park that people come from all over to visit to see it you want to keep it looking good um the matching front just point of information yes there's a lot there and there's a lot of i guess good questions can we get the administration to answer one at a time i'm still veterans

services services i'm still stuck on the uh the investigator right i mean is that accurate is that not accurate are we not hiring an investigator there is no investigations going on she says you don't need it i'd like to hear from the administration as to whether or not we need it and then just move down to the list of other items i mean i'm just cute i'm just curious i apologize no i

appreciate it i just uh you know no matter the circumstances i don't talk over people i was just raised that way no no no i get it right but before we get uh i want to make sure that all the she's bringing up valid questions and i just want to make sure that we've got answers to them that's all there are questions um i'd have the uh vso come down maybe yeah rabbit's going under the table

are there any investigations going on miss bruto not to the effect that you're talking about now okay but what's been happening is as we're getting new veterans who come in on chapter 115 benefits this head position slash investigator goes through and reviews what all the qualifications for chapter 115 they're the ones who do the intake and then once the intake is completed and it has been put into the

on-base system with dvs it's then passed on to um whichever clerk that covers that portion of the alphabet correct so that's a head clerk investigator yes ma'am there's not another position of investigator that position in your budget is vacant yes and there is no intention on hiring anyone because you cannot go out and do an investigation going to someone's home correct no no ma'am what's happening it

so the way that dvs changed it is that they've changed it to say assistant vso for a large community we never they never changed that as far as the job classification is from what i understand when um my predecessor left there was a re reclassification not a re they redid the job description and it says to directly to report to the vso as their assistant so that's not the investigative position that was the

investigator that is no that one that got brought up was uh the clerk was one of the clerks that got brought up um judith mata who is the head clerk her title slash investigator because she's the one who's going and doing that position while the while it was vacant the head clerk investigated would be miss mata yes okay and that's fine there is a head clerk investigative position and she does however there is not

there is not an investigative position look at page 96 do you have the budget in front of you look at page 96 you're slotted for one two three four five six people plus yourself when really there's only five people plus yourself yes ma'am right now there is right and when i first took over there was somebody else in that position and they've transferred to another portion of um did well the city and i have not filled

that position yet because i was still trying to get everything um under under um what's the word that i'm looking for under control trying to figure out how much each person was going to be able to do how we're going to allocate the different workflows and the fact that yes we are having veterans who are passing away but we're also having more veterans come back on and the caseloads are going to be increasing again

i disagree with that i think that we're servicing less veterans now than we serviced years ago when i first started here and over the years we seem to be losing uh less and less and the travel allowance um let's talk about the travel allowance what is this travel allowance for because i've never seen that is this the in-state travel mileage yeah didn't that go up in-state travel went from three thousand

to seven thousand five hundred

that's on page 87 97

and um council prayer just to correct we have three trainings a year one of them is dictated by the department of veterans services which is fully paid for for our other trainings dvs does not reimburse the city on those trainings just on that one for in leominster in october when dvs mandates that for it's supposed to be for all staff members but of course we can't close down the office

and whomever would like to attend attends but the cost of hotels meals whatever is included in the um registration fee those costs have all gone up and so and allows paid they've always paid for those costs when they happen in leominster they have it at the doubletree i've been there yes ma'am that's the one in october that dvs pays for dvs pays for one complete training a year and the other one's the other tma

veterans there's four veterans groups around the state for different places how often do they have meetings we have um the southeast has three meetings four meetings a year with one of them being at our summer conference that we host down in hyannis this year and then our other business meetings are within different areas within the southeast such as last year we had one here on fall river then in braintree in

weymouth and then our doom one will be in and down the cape when we have our business meeting i'm going to check on that because but they've paid for all of that uh the twenty thousand dollars for parade the most we've ever spent is twelve thousand total so i don't know where we spent uh 20 000.

we spent approximately 12 000 on the veterans day parade alone ma'am and then for um memorial day parade we paid almost seven thousand dollars to include the transportation for durfee case band bay state band dixie land band and the windjammers and the boston whalers they're all paid and what was that total bay state band it was 20 000 total that you've spent on parades between memorial day and veterans day yes ma'am

well last veterans day we did the drive by parade so no we didn't the last one we didn't oh no we we did walk it uh what do you tell me about the nine thousand five hundred and sixty-five dollars that went for um monuments that was a grant which was on the um a matching grant that was in there for three years and it was supposed to come off in fy 21

and it was put in there last year it's supposed to continue as long as it was only actually gonna continue it only said three years on the documentation what grant ready did you talk to about that i didn't that's what i was told by my predecessor then we need to talk to the grant writer because i think that might have been a little bit more and also on here uh furniture and stuff for the office just

point point of information just counseling i guess i'm confused with that statement so a matching grant anytime we get a grant the matching grant is only good for the term of the grant so the grant was a three-year grant then we were only on the hook to match for 75 000 for each year we wouldn't be perpetual until 9 500. correct but we they had reapplied whatever i was told they reapplied so it would continue

that it was still reoccurring okay i think i just wanted like clarification that's all i mean there's a there's a reduction another thing that um i feel bad i mean this is concerning to me i asked today for for the munis what did we turn in last year at the end of um could you speak in your microphone counselor sure what we turned in last year and what we have left to spend right now

the veterans budget has a total of 888 761 and that is that was pulled today so we have the month of june before this closes out so they have all that money in the budget um and last year i think it was something like seven hundred and fifty thousand yes ma'am hand back the handout that i gave you before the meeting started for fy 2019 there was a turnback of four thousand five hundred

fifty three thousand nine hundred forty nine dollars for fy20 there was a return of 255 199 for fy21 it was seven um seven hundred fifty thousand forty three how many people yeah so that means that we're budgeting a lot higher than we need to there yes ma'am you know let's get a little creative let's look at our veterans that as attorney aitkin said earlier many of our veterans are older they're on pensions

or they're getting 115 apartment rents have gone up for them is there some kind of a program with all this money you have to help some of our veterans i know they're doing it in other communities if maybe that would be something you could look into yes ma'am and if you look at the other two documents that i provided to excuse me where are the documents that you're talking about they will give them out before the

meeting do i have them that was in the packet you give a handout yeah is that in the packet do you let me give i thought it was yeah i can give her mine it's just the two pages

how's that

you were saying something about the documents yes ma'am on those are the two desktop budget charts that are issued to us by the department of veterans services on the fiscal year for fiscal year 22 the maximum income that was allowable for a single person was 2147 dollars for a married couple it was two thousand nine hundred and four dollars this is what's mandated by the state and we can't go above those um

allotted amounts so if somebody is making two thousand dollars on just hypothetically two thousand dollars on va disability monies and then they're getting another thousand dollars for social security that puts them over that threshold of the twenty one hundred dollars for fiscal year twenty three the new desk truck is two thousand two hundred and sixty five dollars for single and three thousand fifty two dollars for

mary they've also increased the amount of money that uh for assets income assets to eighty four hundred dollars for single and sixteen sixteen six were married this just recently went up within the covid time period also on when you were talking about the turn back of the 750 000 i wasn't here during that fiscal year but i also turned back when i was in raynham a lot of money due to the fact

that people came off of chapter 115 benefits because they were receiving pandemic unemployment their pandemic unemployment was an additional six hundred dollars a week putting them well over the allotted amount of money that they were going to be giving because just that alone is twenty four hundred twenty four hundred dollars which again that puts them over that asset per month and this year so far you

have like 888 000 you have to spam you have to spend by within the next uh less than 30 days and um so it's still going to be if you spend 100 000 it's still going to be 788 so you're still going to be in the same ballpark you were last time and um i think that you know helping veterans by paying their rent and the state allowed this wasn't like the state

didn't allow it that you cut a check to housing and then you cut a check to them because then when they want to apply for benefits through dta or what have you they can do that and their income is lower because they have the same structure that you're talking about a person that makes so much all of those figures have to do with people that are going to get chapter 115.

this is not every single person that gets chapter 115 but this could be somebody this could be a veteran that we're helping i spoke to a woman veteran at the vet's kitchen the other day and she got her by not paying housing and then giving her a check she lost food stamps and that was important to her so that that's not helping um i wish that you would go back

to doing that but the other thing and there's there's more that i could get into but um how many people are collecting chapter 115 now can we just get a response to that statement is that is that true i mean have we changed the way we're making payments no i'm still making payments according to the 108 cmr which is issued by the commonwealth of massachusetts each each veteran as you know from working with

mr laflem and c conch there are certain veterans who are with transitional housing where a check can be cut to that landlord but that doesn't mean that the veteran turns around and gets additional monies if a veteran's getting say eighteen hundred dollars a month on chapter 115 benefits we can cut a check to their landlords for if they say their rent is twelve hundred dollars we can cut that

check of twelve hundred dollars to the landlord if it's deemed that the veteran or the surviving spouse cannot handle their finances to do that the remaining amount of money is then given to the veteran you can't give them both you can't pay for somebody's rent on a monthly basis and give them the full amount of the benefits it gets deducted from the full amount of benefits no one absolutely was saying that

if whatever the full amount of the benefit is you take money from that benefit and pay let's say the housing authority because now the check that they get the portion that they get back as a benefit if they want to go and apply for food stamps they can and they will be eligible and it was at a meeting and i read an article on it where the state agreed that that would be beneficial to

veterans chapter 115 does not count as income when somebody goes for gta other monies do and if you are receiving it no matter what if you are receiving it you become ineligible so i i'd beg to differ mr is that is that accurate information that the counselors what is it i'm asking if that's accurate information it is i'm asking miss prito if you'll let her answer chapter 115 benefits are

considered a stipend to assist our veterans and their surviving family members it's monetary monies that are given to assist them with everyday cost of livings it doesn't count when you're going it shouldn't count when they're going towards housing i was informed by our housing authority that it does for federal housing but not for our local housing and also for you cannot receive both

transitional assistance and chapter 115 because they're both state aid thank you first of all all the housing that we have in fall river some of the developments are state but the majority are federal therefore it would qualify and as long as they don't care where you're getting the income from but whatever income you're getting is on transitional assistance um the other thing is how many

how many cases do you have now of people on chapter 115 on average right now we have 184 because we've lost many veterans due to the fact through getting older getting older and passing away the fact that we did have a lot of veterans who were on chapter 115 and with the five percent cost of living increase even if they were only getting a little bit of money from us or having us paying their

insurance their gap insurance or their regular policies they came off because of the fact that they went above because of the cost of living and you were correct that we did receive a stipend from the department of veterans services that was paid out totally separate had nothing to do with our regular chapter 115 benefits it was paid and we received it in march after we had already processed our checks for the month

so in april we gave them the payments from january through april and then we gave them their monthly benefit with a stipend in both may and june our checks on part of the monies that were still waiting to come out are the payments that we just did for our june benefits because those have not come out of the um our budget yet because those checks are just now in the process being processed additionally we have other

medical bills and the health insurance everything is still in the process of being paid and it'll be paid out by the end of the by the end of the month when somebody uh collects chapter 115 monies additional monies to help them those have to get certified at the end of the fisc at the end of each month and there's a 30 day period to submit them for certification correct 90 days you're talking about you're talking

about each month when we finish closing out our month depending upon how long it takes for our authorizer to finish authorizing every single case whether it be something for a prescription or a medical procedure every every entry that we put in needs to be authorized by the department of veterans services so as soon as we close out a month whenever that might be we just closed out january and february due to

the fact that they had difficulties with the new system and how they can't just go in and certify a whole entire community whatever date that entry was made all those entries from whichever communities say we put in something on january 6 and then we put more in on january 8th january 10th whatever comes in on each of those days that's what our authorizer is going in and authorizing now instead

of being able to go out and say all of our is there and i will certify all of fall river so it's on a date process now with that being said a lot of times we enter things into the on base system and it doesn't get authorized it could be six eight weeks before it gets authorized when once that's done and we have no disallowances then we can close out the month

in order to get our funding back we're back dated between 12 to 18 months being reimbursed by the commonwealth for our monies coming in on chapter 115 benefits for every dollar we pay out we get 75 cents back on our burials we get a hundred percent back and aren't our flags for graves we get that money 100 money back and back to your comment about the 25 000 for flags we also purchase three by

five four by six five by eight american flags and two by three and three by five pow flags for all the commonwealth for all the municipal poles and our flags and graves officer is the one who goes around and replaces the flags and at our half staffs he either lowers or raises the flag for every half staff notification that the city gets that's fine but you put twenty five thousand dollars

i know it's seven thousand for flags at 70 cents you didn't spend the rest of the money you could buy flags for every place in the city you wouldn't have spent that kind of money it's too much in that budget but going back to the chapter 115 normally because i've checked these things before and normally a month ends there's 30 days it's submitted now it goes to mr shackney

it's certified and then we get it a year later but when we have july of 21 being submitted in september we're not going to get that until september we're not going to get it for july when we have august being september 28th when we have september going in in november when we have october going in in january november going in in january december miss brito would you like to respond

going in in january 90 days and now february that's 90 days and january february would you like to respond yes ma'am um june of last year dvs transitioned over to a new system in the virtual gateway it's called on base there were issues with a everybody across the commonwealth learning the new on-base system there were also system technical difficulties we did not get input for our recertifications in until

i was not here for the city of fall barber but i will tell you how it was in rainham i did not finish getting everything in due to the fact that we're having so many issues with the new system it was supposed to be up and running by the first week in june and it was still not running until the middle to late june of last year as i was saying every single

when you put something in it gets authorized per the day that it goes in so if something went in on june 1st it wouldn't have gotten author everything that got put in on june 1st would get authorized then if you put something in on june 8th that's when it would get whatever the tally date that the authorizer gets that's what's going to be authorized per those days we can't have them go in and say okay

you have 50 cases that are still claimed pending to be authorized but there are other communities that are also being waiting for authorization on their claims too we can't close out months until our authorizers go in and approve or disapprove or send it back for modifications we can't close out the month until that's done because if that's not done then we lose money on our reimbursements coming

from the commonwealth that's exactly my concern on losing money on what is authorized because if you put something in that was due in september october and it's not in middle january then that's going to be the authorization date in january that's the date that they'll go to so we're going to wait until january versus waiting till october no ma'am get it for even though we closed out the months aft

within the 90-day time period we still get the money the same time that we would have gotten because dvs is anywhere between 12 and 18 months behind in giving our reimbursements funny never happened like that before i can point the point of order am i gonna be honest i appreciate if we're gonna advocate for the veterans let's advocate for the veterans but we just we've been here for

an hour and i feel like it's in a direct attack that our is at our office all right i'm not trying to excuse me we never questioned ray hey great would be down here for two minutes okay it is it has always been the case that we've been 12 to 18 months behind on reimbursements okay have we lost any money i don't i don't understand what the counselor is asking

for is she asking for more money she's asking for less asking she's just making statements she we the administration can't even answer a question legitimate questions we're talking about seven sent flags versus and completely ignoring the fact that we're getting larger flags i just i want to know my question is what can we do to to help the benefit of the veterans what benefits should we be lobbying the state

legislature to increase the uh the allowance whatever the case may be i just like to get some to some budgetary questions i think part of it would be to give veterans more money veterans giving them quarters maybe looking at rent because rent is a real but council you're making statements and the vso who is highly educated in her job is responding to you saying that's not correct and she's laying out because i

have also stopped speaking she's laying out detail for detail on why it's not correct and explaining what the process is and then you're saying to her no oh i'm going to double check i'm going to do let's talk about respect for our for our department heads because this has been ongoing for what a year now and it's enough is enough we want all of our people at citizen's input to come and

not say anything bad but we're going to attack a department head and it's very awkward not attacking i'm asking her questions and you're not letting her answer and then you're not taking her answer point of order yes i don't see anyone attacking anyone i see a disagreement between how the money can be spent to be honest but um we can move forward we can keep going with the conversation and just keep

answering the questions do you have any further questions questions no i just would say that i think if we could look to help with rent and give people money for quarters i think that that would be helpful to all of our veterans because when we got rid of the armory um there was an agreement made with then um mia lambet and i think that that should be followed through with that i yield thank you if i

may very briefly um there uh there is ten thousand dollars for quarters in the fy 23 budget i think it's important to note that and then in addition uh noting that the pine street uh wine item which is just below flags at the very bottom does show a reduction from 75 000 to 25 000. now that's not just pine street it's also memorial park in the vet center however that is part of the effort to

not use one time money that 75 000 has been in there for a couple budget cycles and i think the key is that pine street really needs more um than just 50 or 75 000 it really needs a significant um investment and i think arpa money is is a great way to do that uh it's already received windows and some flooring and other things but it needs to be brought over the finish line

and so you can anticipate that over the next several weeks whether it's through county money or whether we do it through a city orp of money there is going to be an arpa proposal um that i hope if it does come as county money you'll support for a significant infusion of cash into pine street to make that a place that's uh suitable uh for our veterans who i've really had the

pleasure of getting to know a little bit since i started and really pretty remarkable uh group of men and women uh and i'm i'm you know proud to have uh served maybe not in always the same conditions but at least in the same uniform and we can't use any of this money the 888 000 that we have in there now well i don't think we can take money that

is in this budget and you know sort of throw it back to the next budget since we'll have a month left there was the 75 000 from fy 22 that was put towards pine street that was part of that line item i don't think we can you know start shuffling around money at this point but uh there is a commitment by this administration to investing in pine street vice president dion

i'm going to go out on a limb i'm going to say that i believe everybody in this room agrees on one thing under training and education there was an error in the dollar amount of 25 000 which should be um 22 2 250 i believe 2 500 2 500 okay so i am going to make a motion that that line item and the veterans under general government be reduced by 22 500 um that would also be

reduced under appropriations and it be sent to full council for a vote just to correct it and i'm only making the motion now before i forget and with that i you know counselor and state one council could even are you going to take promotion or can we do it do we have to do it full counseling i i totally agree with you um but is it appropriate to make that motion now or when we

take a vote on the uh on the budget um the way we vote line by line i would defer to corporation council is it appropriate to make that motion now or do we have to wait it's it's best well i'm sending it to full council but making the motion to send it there be voted by the full city council oh we make it i guess my question would be just

point of order my question would be are we making a recommendation to full council to approve the budget if so then i would say that we would make the motion now if you'll prove it no she just wants to reduce that line item no no i get that if if we as a finance committee are going to make a recommendation to full council even though we're full council to either approve or reject the budget if that's

the case then i would say that we would need to entertain the motion if we are just hearing the budget and not referring any recommendations because typically out of committee we make recommendations to the full council so if that's the case then i would say that we would need to entertain the motion now so that it is in control right yeah i mean listen he said typically we make recommendations typically sometimes

we don't make right we just refer to the full council on a routine baseball it doesn't matter we want to vote for it now we're all going to agree it's a mistake right so obviously why wouldn't leave a mistake in the budget whether we do it now or do it later it can be done in full council even if the budget is moved to full council with the recommendation of approval which i don't

think it's going to happen i just would be referred to the full council to discuss and vote on it but we all get it it's a mistake so we're going to fix the mistake okay we should do as much as we can to help the veterans so it's i the reason i'm making the motion is because it's my understanding when not going going to go into full council unless there's a reason to go into full council

who gave that understanding i don't understand where that comes from how can we not go to full council because you can have just finance and adjourn and not go to full council therefore there'll be no vote we want them to think about we have to go to the moment before the full council you can make the recommendation at any time exactly it doesn't have to be tonight we can do it

all at once at the end right or you can do it now it's up to you counselor whatever the will of the council is at this point well i i disagree so if we're gonna take a motion i i'm gonna i'm gonna disagree so i guess we're not gonna if you're not entertaining the motion i got the floor was there there wasn't a second

my choice would be to to do them all at one time we need to change the appropriation as well

all right let me know if you find it i guess what i would what i would say to the motion the reason i would reject it is because we just heard that um pine street needs money so i would say that just as opposed to reducing the budget which is i'm assuming is a balanced budget we keep it in there with the understanding that 25 000 is going to be set aside for improvements for

pine street right so why that's just just my take i mean we're talking about trying to get more monies to um to the veterans so i will just throw that out there uh and whenever we entertain the motion that that's where my mindset's going um in particular to the the budget so the dpw overtime the 25 thousand dollars how have we handled that in the past where did that money we've always

provided services or at least community management has always provided services for parades so when i opened up the the presentation i had said that there was a number of things that were kind of shoehorned into more general categories so my understanding is that there was dpw expenses but they were never called out they were never clearly articulated in the budget they were just part of either aid or

something else uh so this is just this is a way to acknowledge that to say this is the cost and we know what the cost is going in so but they were being charged to this department and not community maintenance i believe they were but i'm also fairly certain that they weren't all on the same line item they there was different ways they were kind of chopped up which just wasn't clear

and the only reason i asked that is because i just don't want to i wouldn't want to spend 25 000 so we can use it elsewhere if it was being accounted for in community maintenance right so i'd rather just increase that that overtime budget if that's where you know the service is going to be provided and just have the 25 000 for other benefits for the community counselors your other counselors can't hear um

so but you're saying that it was directly charged from this yes sir um we would get an inner office request to transfer funds say from my department into um tammy's department for use of dave on overtime whether it be on the weekends or at night for events or again utilizing cdm dcm sorry all these acronyms dcm for the parades or any of the other but also we've taken into consideration that there is a

possibility that that money will have to be increased even more due to the fact that now that we can no longer use auxiliary police that we'll have to assist with over time within the police department for some of these events so can you just clarify when you transferred it what expense item was it taken out of in the past budget it's been taken out of different line items sometimes it's been taken out of the

veterans aid line item but i'm not able to go back and verify from all of them i've only been here in this position since september and from what i understand i have gone through and we have taken it out using the veterans aid line item since i've been here just so that it would come out of a consistent line and that wasn't jumping around from one line item to another

so it was it was charged directly it wasn't a transfer right so it was a direct charge to the uh i would go on back council but as you know if it came out of expenses in fact that went to dpw overtime it would require council approval right require right council approval and we we haven't done it we haven't had any transformations that's all i'm saying so it's probably so

one of two things can happen is it's obviously charged directly to you know the aids benefit or whatever line it is or it's charged directly to dcm for their overtime i just want to make sure i just want to make sure we're not spending twenty five thousand dollars if it right if it's included somewhere else you know i'd rather free up twenty five thousand dollars and now we've got

fifty thousand dollars for pine street look what i found but uh so yeah if we if we i guess we can just clarify that originally i'd put it down under expenses and then i was told that you need to clarify it yeah no yeah if you want but in the absence of any transfers i mean whether it's this 22 i haven't seen it into i looked at all transfers in 22 i didn't see any

can i make a motion for tammy to come down and she could explain this yep here she's here is there a second we're in finance she can come down tammy would do the invoice and then it goes to the general fund bear take one teacher

okay so i'm facilities maintenance community maintenance is a separate department so i do charge them over time for facilities and i have records of any transfers that we've asked for uh so i could get that together for you for last year we're still working out this year's because we just had memorial day parade weekend so i haven't put that together but um i don't know what community maintenance has done

i just know what facilities has so what have you done you've charged them directly for so let's just say there's five thousand dollars in overtime for i'm for facilities you would you would charge that department directly immuno so as opposed to hitting your oregon object it would go to veterans organ objects correct uh no what we do is we ask for a service transfer because that's the way

the uh previous director preferred it to do done listen if we want to talk about what this director is doing versus the other director i would tell you that's in violation of council so you know kudos we're one for one on what people should not be doing yeah all right that's just the way that it's been in other departments that we've charged uh we do put their account number directly yeah

as long as somebody as long as somebody's taking a tally of you know what the prior director did versus the the current director i'm good so we're one for one we're tied okay so moving forward we're going to figure out where we're going and so we're going to leave the 25 000 in here for overtime it's going to be charged directly into this account this is a first step in

trying to do it all right correctly and transparently and whatever's been done in the past has passed the past thank you um so just automobile allowance just a point of order when you talk about dcm tammy is right that cheese facilities what the veterans office uses is facilities for putting up chairs and separate events and things like that not so much dcm dcm was only used to pull

down the wreaths that were put up at christmas time so that may be true you fall under dcm no i fall into facilities and to my understanding i believe that dcm is starting to charge for their services as well i don't know what was done under the previous director over there or the current director i'm sorry however you want to address that but to my knowledge from what i hear is they're going to start doing exactly

what we've been doing for a few years already i'm all for and i'm all for just making sure we identify the cost and and have it in a consistent place so we know how to budget it moving forward right so especially we're doing zero based budgeting we want to know what cost center it's going to be charged through so i'm good good with that i just want to make sure that we're

not double counting you guys can figure out um you know the mechanism and we have a line item specifically for events that you charge that's how we keep track of it okay me personally i like to see dbw i'm sorry community maintenance and facilities keep their overtime and broken down for parades and events and then obviously so i have it i have mine okay so we're adding more but if this is

the way it stays it stays i just want to make sure we're consistent on how it is the best way for us to be transparent no i agree i agree it's just yeah i'm not arguing with that just in terms of the automobile allowance can you just speak to how we came to that determination on and i guess when i originally when i was looking at i've seen 68.20 and i didn't

go to the shame on me i didn't go to the salaries page to see the audio auto allowance breakdown but um are these contractual uh for the individuals that are in well i guess there's two individuals that are not in the union but two individuals that are so if you look at fy22 you see that there were 4 320 worth of automobile allowances um those can be attributed to um

the two employees who are not uh the veteran's agent um so mikayla is the 2500 the other two have the automobile i'm sorry the three have the automobile allowances but of course there's the vacancy for the headquarter investigator part of ms brito's employment package was an automobile allowance that was negotiated okay um and so that's the addition for fy23 okay perfect that's fine

um and then i know we talked a little bit about it but from just my own clarification so when i when i'm looking at um i guess the middle of the expenses here the medical and surgical the hospital for vets and then you've got the ambulance burial vets you've got the vets um the graves and the uh quarters and then you got the aid to the vets so there's changes there so i just want

to make sure that we're covering everything that we absolutely need so if i take medical and surgical in in the hospital for the vets um that's roughly 210 dollars is that going now getting rolled into that 295 yeah i'm looking at fy22 to fy23 yes okay so there's an increase of roughly eighty-five thousand dollars that that's going on and then the um ambulance the the vets graves and the quarters and the

age for the vets are falling down below what you highlighted correct correct okay so those are new object codes that i had our previous auditor create so that again for transparency so that i would be able to account for in a more efficient manner and then uh you know the counselor had mentioned in terms of your travel being reimbursed obviously it's reimbursed so we've got to put a dollar amount in the

in the budget to cover the cost right so that we can get the reimbursement for regular training though when we go um there's two times a year that we go to leominster and one year that we one time that we go down the cape the training in october by dvs all we have we make the reservations dvs pays for it for the ones that we do as the envious oil with training that's

out of our budgets that we have to um fund it but that does not get reimbursed by dvs okay and then my my final question was just in regards to the federal poverty level the flp um and the i guess benefit limitations under 115 is there anything that we can be doing as a legislative body to try to increase those benchmarks because obviously cost of living adjustments things like that are

really impacting some of the veterans and kicking them out of their eligibilities is there anything that we can be doing as a legislative body to try to advocate to get those numbers increased so that we can probably the federal government that's because that's the federal property level it has nothing i just i just wasn't sure if we could do something at the state level with 115 benefits things of that nature

um but listen i'm i'm good with advocating for the federal delegation as well they just don't listen to us as quickly but no that's all um again it's all mandated through their exact funds i mean they're going they're changing the way that we recertify so it's now no longer in um january for them to turn around and boot people off so we'll be doing it in july now so that way with the cost of living

you don't have somebody on for a half a year and then be told that they're no longer on it and then um this would be more in line for the the administration to answer just in terms of taxes real estate taxes have we have we voted and we meaning the city council voted on all veteran exemptions that are out there in terms of uh general law that we can accept to kind of have

exceptions or maybe maybe you can answer that so yes as of right now um the last i believe it was through home act ii was the local option for the gold star parents yeah which was that was just approved and but with anything else it's not um it would all be local options so right now i believe it's 400 for um 22a we can as a community can say that they're going to double it or

even go up as high as say a thousand dollars that's all a local option but still only get reimbursed for that mandated from the commonwealth so you'd only get that reimbursement for the four hundred dollars okay and it's just it's a shift of the burden anyways you're shifting it to to another taxpayer right so okay i just i just want to make sure that we're we're utilizing all the exemptions that we

possibly can um you know i know we need to take votes on general law to to allow some of those to take place i just want to make sure we're doing that for the veterans yeah most and again most of it's through mass general law okay perfect with that i yield thank you counselor and ca council washington hi thank you so um city administrator akins you answered some of my question i just want to kind

of piggyback on that with the 75 000 i think a few years ago council president put that in the budget for pine street added in um we have a state-of-the-art beautiful wall down there when i looked at the budget i just received the budget in my long tenure here but i was a little taken back by the 50 000 i think we had talked earlier taken out of the budget i don't understand the justification for that

because this weekend i went down to the pine street and i know that you said that um we got to bring it just past with some work has been done but i you know i know that you said some work has been done and i've seen that you know the there was some flooring done but was not finished i mean where the dv uh disabled veterans of america me their floor is still not completed

and there they are these men in there with their canes with carpets in there and and tattered rugs i think that um i'm glad to know that the 25 thousand dollars was just a typo so um back to what um counselor dion was saying you know if you make a motion i don't know how that you know if you could put that in there or council kadeem had said it

into that line item and and bring it back up there but it is very concerning that building yes some work has been done there are some windows that were put in there but the basement windows i mean there is big big issues and so my thought is that that money should never be touched that what the best thing we can do for our veterans is to give them a place to go and make it attractive for

the younger veterans that you're saying that are coming in so i just um whatever we can do to keep that money there is great i think you answered a lot of my questions that i had earlier about this budget i do the travel budget seems high it really really does i think i'm a little bit confused maybe you can give me some clarification because we're talking about a interstate travel with an increase of 4 500 and

we're mixing that in with the training that we're in conferences that we're going to that we just said we have 2 500 and so when there's like a mix match so is there an interstate travel of seventy five hundred dollars now and does also the trainings come out of that because i think we're mixing the two around so i i i do feel that that is seventy 7 500 is high um i'd like to see

why it's so high um that cost because if we're talking about conferences then we're going to add on the 2500 onto that so it does appear high and i guess what i'm saying is if we can cut the fat anywhere and give it back into our veterans and and serve them i think that's the best thing to do but you did answer a lot of the questions that i had

so with that i'll yield miss britto do you want to answer that again about the interstate travel and mileage can you repeat that do you want to answer that again about why that's 7 500 the in-state travel and mileage there's one conference that's reimbursed and there's three others that aren't reimbursed there are two others that are not reimbursed plus we have our business meetings that we attend on a quarterly

basis um i'm also on the executive board for the massachusetts veterans service association and i do go to those meetings those are a monthly basis but for those we have been doing them mostly by zoom it just started back in person um and before like you were saying a lot of it was virtually yeah so we didn't have to pay out those different costs but now with the the increase in hotels with

the hotel taxes and whatnot that's all gone up and the also the mileage the amount for mileage has gone up so you would take that out of instead of taking that in your budget out of trainings for the conferences you would take that out of interstate travel for the hotels and that portion for the hotels so for training so he's historically been i'm new here his three thousand dollars has been

enough to cover the conferences because it's not that it's just all of the sudden you know one is reimbursed and the others are not it's just always been like that might i'm correct right so there's a 4 500 increase to those conferences is what you're saying so it's about a 4 500 increase what's happening right now with those conferences well not past years it's not just those conferences that's also

including like reimbursable mileage and so again just as you this is my first budget yeah so what we want to do is we want to be able to put the amount of money in there and not have to go in and ask for to take it out of something to take it out of someplace else or yeah so i'd rather we'd rather have that money there than not there well thank

you for you you're from the surface i want to say that again briefly yeah i also think one of the differences and i could be wrong please do correct me if i'm wrong but i believe that um in the past there had largely been just one person attending trainings in conferences and meetings and now because the the requirement is really that the entire staff is trained what uh agent bruto is trying to do is

get as many of her staff trained at these different conferences as well so you bring a good point there because i get it you're trying to run this with fidelity do it the way it's supposed to be done but your staff is union you is they're a union so can you force them to go to these trainings i mean are they willing so i guess that just brings up a whole nother a whole nother

question so it's not a matter of it being like me forcing them to that's it's stuff that's mandated by that so they have to go so it does so they're not going to say i'm not going to this training i'm going to need an increase and it's not part of my contract that they have to go to these it's part of their job so the 4 500 is because now your entire staff needs

to attend these trainings and you're running the department with fidelity okay fair enough thank you thank you do you heal the counselor yes i yield thank you counselor in c2 council camara thank you um i got a question if we're talking about fixing pine street why wouldn't we use american recovery money for that if it's going to be a capitalist project like we're doing with the rest of this budget

that's exactly uh so i mean if there's money within the vso budget that can be put towards pine street great uh if there's arpa money uh that's available great i mean as much money it seems like the theme here is let's use the opera money for capital outlay projects to save money for a budget that was the intent so why are we going to go why are we going to get away from that now in

this one account for 25 000 it was a mistake someone put in there's a typo 25 went to 25 000 for 2500.

why are we just now not going to use opera money to help the veterans into pine street oh we are regardless of what happens here tonight there is going to be opera money that i'm going to use for this my colleague can see one and i kind of disagree on this issue where he's saying give it to them save all the money for them like well if we're gonna do that

just use the operating monies to give let's do as much repairs as we can for capital projects use some of the uh recovery money for that man the only category we can use is lost revenue right so that's that's the only category would fit in right so it wouldn't fit in any of the other categories so would then if you've got items that are you think are going to fit in categories that you

really want to do when we don't get them there we're going to we're just dwindling down the lost revenue which is the most the least restrictive that's all that's all i was going so we've got one and i and i agree with my colleague in c2 i think there's more money that's near than twenty five thousand dollars i'm just saying correct i think what all these capital items were coming out of law school less revenue

i i i think there's an argument to be made for one or two other categories but but i we had this conversation a few weeks ago i i mean with county money i think it's going to be a much harder uh passage but it seems that with city money uh it's just it's a slightly more liberal interpretation of the rule um so i don't know that we're entirely limited to lost revenue but i agree with you

that there's not a lot of categories this could fit into my only point is if we could save money and go directly to the benefits of the veterans let's just try to do that um so getting back to my colleague in seat six when she was talking about paying the rent that's out of the question completely according to you no other community is doing that for any of the veterans we're able to go in and through

one of the sections in the 108 cmr if somebody's in arrears you can do a one-time payment for the in arrears and it can't be more than three months um but again that's a one-time thing or there's also portions with payment where with moving expenses when one chapter 115 client moves into another community there's assistance with that but as far as rent and assisting veterans with their rent per se okay

i hear what you say but i think if there's anything we can do let's say i'm sure i mean this whole council wants to help our veterans if it wasn't for the veterans we wouldn't be here right now if we were i mean we would probably be speaking a different language because i've been told by many veterans at once i say that all the time yeah it's true right so we have

everything to give we have everything that we have because of our veterans so let's give them as much as we possibly can um and and with everything else i just um i don't agree with the travel part of it but just you said all how many people in your in the office right now are going for training give me a number 5 two five five people and all the trains are overnight

conference um all of them are either four or five day conference so the three events that you do yearly are all five day conferences yes so you're gonna close the office for five days what are you gonna do no that's what i was saying earlier i can't just we're trying to early you said you were not you couldn't close the office and everyone has to go on some of them on we're doing it

staggered and for those who would like to go they can go to the in person anything else they would have to do on their own pace and i'm not sure how they're going to be redoing that because again they're re revamping everything on the virtual gateway so how many people do you anticipate going this year to all the conferences one two or five what's the number probably two of us probably two of you

to all the conferences yes so hope that they're five day conferences so it's a total 15 days hotel stays meals yes okay all right um because i tend to think it's a little high i mean three thousand dollars i guess i get prices are going up but they're not going up fifty percent hundred percent they're going up twenty percent for the most part but all right i'm good with that thank you

so much are you thank you anything further on veterans counselor and seat seven counselor pozo hello this question is the city administrator so we you mentioned bristol county opera money why is the pine street project not on the city's opera money list well it can be i mean i just i'm always interested in offering the city council the opportunity to put the five signatures on and send it

to bristol county saying we support veterans but the city's happy to do that if you don't want to sure but it my question is why isn't it not already so i've asked before for a list of the things that have come out of the arpa committee we still haven't got that list yet i know it's been talked about that it's virtual it's video i don't know what it is but the

question is i've asked for it haven't gotten yet yeah it was at least what a week and a half ago yep so so my question is is that is that project not on the city's radar currently as far as our money is concerned um it was not uh it's in conversations about the budget about the condition of pine street um it is uh more recently uh on the city's

radar i think part of it is that um there was this sense that because for the last several years there was 75 000 budgeted for pine street that the work that we thought was being done at pine street was being done and as it turns out not the case um and you know there are probably you know any number of little landmines around the city that you know in my tenure city

administrator i will discover and you know try to do something about this is one of them so uh realizing that um what we thought was being done uh and what um officer britto thought was being done was not being done as well as we need it to be as well you know as as needs to be done to honor our veterans um this is now something that's a priority and that we'll use for opera money

is there any chance i can get that list not tonight tomorrow not on the table i'll talk about it off the record thank you sir i yield anthony aiken what do you what was what did you think was being done that wasn't so our understanding is that the 75 000 that's been in the budget for the last couple years was replacing windows was you know was doing all sorts of things to improve pine street

and you know the proof is in the pudding i guess and it seems that from what uh councillor washington has seen in the last just in the last week or so the condition of pine street is is not uh as improved as it really should be given the money that's gone to it so that not only does that require resources to go there uh forth uh but it also probably requires

additional inquiry to find out um what happened to those funds that that were spent uh and why the work um so it maybe wasn't done have you have you matched up what they've said was done to the actual building itself or is it just on council washington's statement at this point it's just on council washington's statement um and so it's on my agenda for this week to actually go to pine street and take a look

that's something i haven't done and i'm going to do in order to get to the bottom of it so there's certainly a lot more that needs to be done but the exterior of the windows heating systems i believe all of that i mean they've that all was done originally right no doubt about that there there have been certain things done but i i just feel like the condition of pine street is not

what it needs to be no ugly consonant c one console kidding so uh i guess two things so as we talk about you know pine street this is where i had mentioned about the capital improvement plan being all-encompassing right so i think it leaves all our buildings off the table to to really see what the true capital needs are you know pine tree being one of them so i think we should

have a document that would say okay this is the condition obviously i i think we would say based on some improvements that were probably fair right and then how much do we need going into that building right i think just throwing money at it without knowing a true value and what the the needs are that's part of the capital improvements that should be coming through whether that's coming from facilities

uh community maintenance whoever facilities had done that originally counselor they had taken an inventory of the building and what it needed originally facilities had done a list originally of what the building needed right but but we have we don't see that with part of the capital improvement plan that comes down to the city council so we we get a document and we don't see all the buildings as to like we don't

see a true capital improvement plan um that includes all of our buildings so i think that's something we need to and i understand and recognize that the administration is it takes time to build so i recognize that but i think we need to really truly understand what that building looks like amongst including other buildings um the second the second piece i guess is to my colleague and see now i gotta

count because he moved uh seat seven his request did you say we're not gonna get his request i guess tonight you are not in general in general tonight i didn't speak to whether you're to get his request at all i just said tonight i will not do it so i promise no tonight i get that i thought you said it was off the table which i got to concern with if it's off the table i

said it's not on the table like this is not on the agenda tonight i'm not going to speak to what's been requested in the harper meetings well with all due respect you don't dictate what's on the table but this is the city council right council president i thought there was an agenda there isn't it then if you want to continue to ignore the city council at our request then we

can we can go at it right i'm not looking to do that no okay but i've got a colleague in seat seven who has asked it not a week and a half ago two meetings the last two meetings right so and it's not just him it's every other council that's been asking for us so are we not i'll make a motion to reject the budget until we get it motion to reject the budget motion of rejection

made by council canadians ridiculous i'm sorry did you say your secondary counselor seconded by counselor dion no madam clerk i'm the most like a roll call counselor in seat two are we talking about getting a list that was asked for about maybe two council meetings ago it was asked for the last two council at the last two council meetings he's asked for it i understand your point

madam president i haven't made my point all right please tell me what my point is you're gonna say we're gonna reject the budget because he hasn't gotten his list and then tomorrow antonia king just can give him his list but he hasn't given him his list it's been two meetings is that what you're gonna say no all right go ahead so i thought i heard you say that you're not gonna do it tonight

and then i thought i heard you say call me and we can talk about it no sir no no okay my understanding is that we're here to talk about the budget i wasn't going to get into an arpa discussion with council raposo i know he's been asking for it and um while it may um appear to be an easy thing to collect the reality is that there were meetings that were had in a number of different

locations where people were going to suggest arpa uh ways to use arpa yeah and uh we are essentially watching the records of those meetings putting together a list and then also because this is also part of the request going through how many of those things actually can conform to the arpa requirements and what the categories are for the arbonne okay so and so at this point to address something that one i i i don't

have a status on i can't speak intelligently to it i i respect that now let me just get to my point about it beyond that to my colleagues he wants points he's a new city councilor he doesn't know much about the american recovery act neither do i many of us don't it changes it seems to change depending on the needs of the community according to the governor and the federal government everything else

it has changed significantly it's a moving target why you just gave a very elaborate reason on why he hasn't received it why wouldn't you call up the council and tell them exactly what you just told us and let them know that council we i respect the fact that you want this information i respect it's going to help you make the decisions going forward he's a brand new city councilor right

i'm new too i just collected in november unfortunately i was a little while ago and i kind of remember some of the stuff that happened so it would be very simple to just reach out that concert did you ever reach out to the counselor or have any department had reached out to the council everyone working on this to just let them know why it is it hasn't understand it why

because this is not the first time he's asked for it he asked for the last meeting again right obviously no one's reached out to him so we want to work together right we want to work and make sure that everyone gets as much information because nothing more is more crucial to us someone sitting in the city as a counselor to get all the information they need to make good informed decisions and you understand that right

so going forward okay not to excite counselors where we're making rejection of a budget certainly because no one's reached out to someone else or no one's given the information because we've all asked for different things not just two meetings ago two years ago three years ago and it seems to be the administration will just take the counselor's request and give an information whenever they feel

it's convenient and then but i would have picked up the phone the next day and says when am i getting this i'll give you a timeline he's a new counselor and i don't you know he's trying to do his best job please tell him why it is he can't give him what you he wants and give him a time frame when you think you can give it to him and he'll understand that and

he won't be asking for it every every meeting right that's my only point that was my point council president although i know you probably tried to read my mind but it's a difficult mind to read at times so i i know why you didn't get it right but i think that we all have to stop you know fighting each other on this stuff because it doesn't make for good government right do we really want to

reject this budget today no did my kindly really want to make that comment no but out of frustration of what's going on i don't blame them right and if we don't have a working relationship where counselors are going to be giving phone calls and counselors will call the administration say hey what's going on with this thing you know how much more do i have to go down in television and

publicly ask for something that should have been given or shouldn't explain to why i'm not getting it so i'll know it ahead of time that's my only point is that we all want to work with you guys but you have to really just communicate and we maybe we should be communicating as well but new counselor doesn't you know he just wants to get information and it should be given at least if he

doesn't get the information tell them why you know you're never going to see that if that's the case i'll tell them it's going to take us some time give me some time you're not going to get it within the next month or two but we promise we'll get it to you asap here's what we're thinking that's all that's what that's worth with that idea thank you we have a motion to reject the budget

made by council kadeem seconded by councillor dion roll call discussion discussion concern i appreciate my colleague in c2's remarks because i think he was very articulate one thing i will disagree is i absolutely wholeheartedly meant to to reject and i will take a vote because quite frankly i'm all about partnership this goes back to the braga bridge it goes back to conversations it goes back

to calls that i get from the administration trying to work with them always trying to reach out and work with them but yet when one of my colleagues asks for information and we can't get the information we requested or were pushed off i mean we've been talking about opera the entire night my colleague in c7 asked for a question asked for information that he's been requesting for the last three months

two months whatever you want to call it it's pretty close to two three months we can't have the discussion i've done this before with prior administrations let's be consistent if we're not going to get the information of the city council requests and there's going to be just a lack of respect for city councils and i'm ready to vote to not approve the budget until we get the documentation that we requested i i

don't i don't understand how difficult it is and why there shouldn't be a list of requests that have been put in for opera i mean every single day it seems that you know priorities are changing and i get priorities changed but we keep going down the road the priorities are going to change even more and then when are we going to start making the decision we spent on lost revenue at least 100 times

i don't think there's any more less revenue monies right so and and as the priorities keep changing we're going to keep spending the lost revenue money which is is no longer existing at that point so i'm ready to take a vote i made the motion and i and i stand by where i where i am counselor and c3 council vice president dion yeah i'm not going to speak for anybody these

are my comments and my comments alone opera funding is fi i don't think this should be dismissed at all opera funding is very significant if you look at the mayor's letter faux river is receiving 85.6 million from opera rescue plan the city will utilize these funds to invest in one time capital expenditures which will alleviate the burden on tax base and not create a structural deficit

so i guess really the question is what opera funding has been used for that purpose a because there have been many opera dollars that has been spent on other things other than alleviating the taxpayer burden and for capital expenditures my experience with opera being on the opera committee only for a short time if we go to square one where the public meetings occurred there were two public meetings

people came up people gave suggestions told what they thought the money should be spent on etc etc we're told anybody who wants funding can apply there's no application the application process is tell the administration you what project you have how much money you want basically um i'm putting this real simple um you know that they go through if they get 20 requests they go through the 20 requests nope nope

nope i'll send these two to the opera committee the net nope nope yep these will go to the opera committee the opera committee looks at the ones that are sent to them there are many projects that never go to the opera committee is that a correct statement and because of that and because of the process we can't we will never be able to have a concise realistic list and that's not your fault

that something it's not tangible a lot of it has just strictly been ideas that have fallen by the wayside so if we're going to be honest about this whole thing you're never going to get a concise list it's just not going to happen it's not possible for it to happen and that's and and that isn't necessarily negative or anybody's fault it's just the way this is rolled out if i may yes what i understand the

request to be and who knows what i understand the request to be is all of the suggestions and requests that have been made in the early days of arpa so when the city council opened for public comment and neighborhood meetings and any number of other places where people presented their opera ideas and i don't know what and i but i believe there were there were records i don't know whether whether it was front

of here or a committee but i know there was a number of meetings and finding out those meetings uh when they took place uh what was said who has notes who has a record um has been a task and we've been doing that i could be wrong but i don't ever remember any discussion on this floor all right so it wasn't on the sport i thought it was nothing to do matter of

fact because the city council was shut down right from the get-go saying we had no say in it that's right we had no input into it so we could just sit back and take the ride so there were there were public meetings i guess where there was a record of those two yep um and then there's been other things i believe they'll be televised yes they were televised we have we you know we have people

watching those going through getting why i i actually think the request is a little more detailed than that get all this information there i think i don't know it could be wrong but maybe you're right so so what i understand the request to me is what were all the suggestions but then in the context of those suggestions what's eligible and what's not so that's a that's a second level of inquiry right um so that's

ongoing uh and i i would hope i think council reposa would acknowledge that i'm very responsive about a lot of different things uh that there are you know questions about this is one that has taken quite some time in order to to do um and we're in the process of it so minutes kept ah i'm sorry minutes kept um well we're just going from the recordings i don't know if there were

minutes kept i don't i don't believe there were but i also know that uh there's other folks that in meetings with community members in a less formal setting did take notes and so i've asked for those and just tried to track down anybody that has a record of this stuff so basically that's it in a nutshell and it's pretty obscure it is pretty obscure but i think it's doable like if it wasn't doable i would

have said it's not doable but you know but the reality is i know the records are out there but yeah 85 million is extremely significant impacted last year's budget it's impacting this year's budget it can impact the taxpayers moving forward for years to come if we utilize it properly but with that i yield thank you counselor did you have your hand up yeah i just wanted to ask i couldn't hear

from here but council kadeem said something about uh the bret braga bridge what was that about it was about cooperation it's the same thing that i've been saying like cooperation's a two-way street sometimes i feel like it's a one-way okay you know so we never nobody ever wants to to partake and share lanes i'm glad you said that because i read your email as well as the council president's email

that i was the only counselor invited to the bridge lighting that was factually inaccurate well then you'd have to take that up with the mayor i know there was somebody who came up and sent us an input and said that the mayor is a liar so if that's the case then you might you might agree you might agree with them because i think it was who said hold on i think you know i

understood your point of order but counselor prayer was i was not dead coogan said that you you were invited that you you told him you were invited correct no that's not true i went to the cove with my husband because his aunt died who was like a second mother to him we went there for a drink when i got there and saw the lieutenant governor and everybody sitting there i said hello

and they said oh we're going to go see the lighting of the bridge well i could tell you council progress point of information i just was to say yet again the city council was not invited correct so there's no cooperation in partnership with the city i wasn't invited either so let me just get that straight thank you i'll i'll have a conversation with mayor coogan who said i was different i mean i'm not i wasn't

yeah i might be a little uh just get back to what we're here for yeah that competition's over council prayer yes to my you know today i mean i really have a passion for veterans and today being the 78th year of d-day where my godfather lost his leg on the bridge of normandy and i've been thinking about on the beach of normandy and i've been thinking about i know i'm very

passionate about it so i don't mean to upset you but i want to make sure that every penny that i can get from my veterans i'm going to get and i understand thank you and i understand that completely ma'am and my father too was a world war ii veteran and as you know i'm a marine corps veteran so trust me when i say that i'm looking out for my veterans that's why i want to do that

outreach so that we can go ahead and get more veterans in and you know let them know what their benefits are and as counselor washington had stated we need to get more of the younger veterans in so that's why we're planning on doing events for our g w global war on terror veterans and having them know what their benefits are so yes that might just look like whatever but in the long run

with stuff that we're going to be putting out with our outreach it's more than just that i haven't been able to get um our bags for them because they're on back order because i have no clue why um they're the nylon bags we're also putting together hygiene products for our homeless so all that's going to be going into what's going on with the outreach budget portion of it so it's not like i'm just

putting ten thousand dollars in there just to put ten thousand dollars stop by the vet's kitchen there's a lot of people there who could use that um on wednesdays and any other veteran that wants to go it's a very welcoming location i yield madam president thank you councilman seat seven councillor pozo you go ahead i'll let you make your statement before i take the phone no i'm i'm a good counselor okay

i just i'm sorry i opened pandora's box apparently here um but really my my want to know goes back to this idea of not just rerunning the wheel over and over and over again um you know i recognize and you took my line of being the new guy so we're both knew that a little newer it's just the understanding that yes like counselor um dion said it's a significant amount of money i think it's

important to not do the same hard work twice three times four times so i appreciate what you're doing and i know you're working at it and that's awesome i just where i sit here and i look at the amount of money we have and and everything i just want to make sure it's benefiting the people we serve that's all and it's not it's not about who does what or where it comes from and

at the end of the day i'm just looking at how can we utilize this to help the people we surf it's very simple and and i get the process is a little complicated and it started to be complicated from the start but can can we just move on and get it done that's my frustration as i sit here and i appreciate everyone and what they've said but really at the end of the day

just just trying to be the most educated on it so this way i can make an informed decision that's all one piece of information it's actually in response to a question that counselor dion asked um as to whether or not we sift through but we don't so actually everything that gets submitted goes to the committee so anyway thank you i yield councilmancy take council washington i just wanted to comment on something that

you said that they you know did anyone go down there did they take my word for it i just want a second that i can't even hang a picture without it being crooked so he shouldn't take my word for it um but i took pictures and so i be more than willing to give you those pictures but what i do know with my very untrained eye is that the new floors that were put in

are that are being held down with duct tape and that the gentleman that are in his late 70s from the dav his office isn't completed and the work stopped there and it's it's how does it the floors are lifting up it's it's it's the same floor's counselor those are new floors and so that's what i was told these were new floors just newly installed the railing in the back it's like you stick your

hand on it's like a two by four that's gonna go in it's splintered it's it's unsafe the floor that he showed me the cellar where the windows need to be replaced was crumbling as he walked down i would never want my 80 year old father to walk down those stairs but i will say this when i brought it to the administration today and mikayla and talked to them about it they were all on

board so everyone was on board let's figure out what's going on there let's put the money in there so it wasn't you know it wasn't a shock it wasn't a dig it was just like hey do you realize i know that you're just new to this position do you realize you took 50 000 out of that great thing that you put in there that's 75 but 50 000 is out and it's

to my very untrained eye it was not safe and i wouldn't want my family down there let alone the veterans that we serve in this community that should be a pristine place that should be just as beautiful as that wall so i'm just going to leave it there so my guess what i'm saying is i do have those pictures if you would like to know my clarification to attorney aiken was was he saying that

items that facilities maintenance had told us had been done big big ticket items that former person had come down and said was being done at the building i heard him to say that now he's hearing that that wasn't done i don't know what those big tickets are so that's what we need to get i don't know if there i know there's a new flaw that's you know you know all the thresholds got

duct tape all over them and they're all lifting i mean just unsafe so i yield thank you councillor washington uh ma'am just to let you know the stairs are being addressed and we we told them that they could not utilize those stairs that they weren't supposed to be going down into the basement because of the fact that it is unsafe facilities maintenance is already in the process of getting somebody to go out there and

evaluate it and find out what we need to do to shore it up and have new stairs put in yeah that's good so that's already in the works we've already been working with facilities maintenance and an outside great that's great gl counselor i.u councilman c-2 council commander yeah i know we've been going on with this issue for a while but i just want to try to get some clarity on what attorney because i what you just

said getting back to my colleague in c3 she brings up some very good points when she said that you know the requests come in and then the pixel and chooses which ones to get done you said it goes to a committee and then does the committee choose what gets done so do they make a recommendation to the administration no no the committee votes the committee votes yes so there's no final say by the

administration the committee vote so what happens is that people make arpa requests usually it's in the form of a letter with supporting documentation so the majority of people frankly the majority of people that are taken seriously document heavily their requests they show uh you know if it's an organization that serves kids uh and it falls under one of those categories um uh or it's a you know uh

an impacted community you know anything you know they actually gives physics and they get costs and they give all that sort of thing um some more than others but but almost all of them come with a pretty uh robust level of documentation as well as a letter saying what they're asking for so the community has the final site committee has the final say however um if the committee has

questions a lot of times they'll table the request and ask the person making the request to come back and uh in person give more information so some of the requests are considered without testimony others are and the ones that require more information from the committee uh are done with additional testimony so if members of the council make a request our recommendation that's what we feel the money should be

spent on it goes to the committee uh i mean i suppose though if there's a request from the city council for that actually is a proposal um i mean we've talked about using it for the um the infrastructure work for the uh cso project to help alleviate the tax how would that work what's going to be send it to the committee and just say hey well so i i think the the the

administration take the lead on that well the the path forward would probably be to figure out you know who's the department head that would be doing that right so in this situation it's probably mr furling correct right so if the phone make a presentation to the committee that's exactly right so right so anybody any counselor could probably sit down with mr phil and say hey we're really interested in that

he might say you know what i have x y and z that is already kind of a developed idea and he makes that proposal fair enough thank you thank you thank you any more discussion on the motion the motion on the floor to reject the budget madam clerk roll call madam president before you get to that you do have the motion on the floor to reduce the veterans expenses um is that still um so

the counselor kilby had second it and then he had withdrawn his second and he is downstairs so my motion got uh withdrawn no no oh counsel motion so you'd like to take up the motion to reject the budget yes would that be both appropriation orders the for the general fund as well as the ems fund those two enterprise those two comprise the the whole budget at the moment council what's your wish on that

so i think we're missing some counselors or at least one one he went downstairs let me take a five-minute break so can i can i just get some clarification did the counseling c3 say that there were projects that were set aside on the opera monies and then not everybody gets approved not all ideas have gone to the committee but the committee vets the ones that do and then they vote on it whether they

get approved or don't get approved right here is the list of projects some projects that have been approved if you want to look at it and then did you and maybe i misunderstood the conversation did you say uh administrator aiken that that's not true i'm fairly certain that anything that's submitted to the committee that has a you know that has a uh allowable use i mean there's some things that are very

clearly just aren't allowed point of clarification i think what my colleague is getting at is that you suggested that um when she made the example that the requests come in and then the mayor decides which projects to go you clarify that the myth doesn't have a say in it at all that's right the committee is the one that approves it or disapproves it that's right so the committee gets all the all the requests

i believe that's true like i'm starting to question it now because you know once you get asked the question a number of times jesus but no i'm i'm actually pretty confident that whatever comes in gets submitted to the committee i don't think the mayor does anything to to vet or whittle down the selection because that's you know that would just be putting an influence on there that you know that he's not interested in

including the committee has the final say and the entire deliberation as to what's before it so then can i ask counseling c3 through you madam president do you feel that that's the case that all the projects have gone through the committee i made the statement that not all requests have gone to the opera committee and i stand by that and i'm not saying you know if there were 20 requests

that eight you know only five went but it's not it's there's no formal process really it's very um oh that's what i'm looking for potential yeah i mean you know it's not like applying for a a building permit where you have to fill in like all kinds of things and documents right right or a grant or whatever i mean it's basically pretty simple somebody can say for example you know what should i pick

one off the list uh just so i understand i want to i want to make sure you and i are like in other words ideas have been brought have been brought to the office mayor's office and not all ideas have been forwarded to the committee is it correct that that the mayor doesn't ultimately decide an end result who gets what money yes it's done as a committee um but i think anything that's submitted in writing

as an application to the arpa committee is submitted to the arpa committee and if you know something i don't know i i apologize for for not knowing that but i'm i'm fairly certain that you know there may be people that say hey i've got an idea that doesn't go anywhere because it's it's not ever formalized as an application but from what i understand any submission letter is is forwarded to the upper county

that's what i that's that's what i believe is is the case well i guess we could ask the mayor if he's ever not sent any to the opera committee i mean he would have his reasons not to i'm not saying it's a bad thing no no absolutely but um you know you know the only thing i can imagine if if something clearly you know we want to redo the highway you

know well that's just not that's not allowable use but any other submission that that even has a that even in a in the most creative way might might might fall into a category i think goes to the arbor committee and then they have that discussion as to whether or not it's an allowable use under the rule so i don't know of any written request that's ever been put aside okay that answers my questions i guess

to answer your question on the motion what do i want to do with it there's a motion on the floor and there's a second right but madame clark asked if you also wanted to reject the appropriation orders oh uh yeah all of them okay just needed that okay thank you on the motion the member of council's on the uh on the committee yes was it council affair beckham no no councillor originally it was

peckham i'm on the committee now you're on a committee now okay so i mean you're a conduit to i mean you attend the meetings your conduits who i've been to as to i mean i have the list of stuff that's been approved so that's my comment thank you madam clinton just a i guess a follow-up to that i'm sorry just pandora's box just opens so you've been to through you madame president yes

to counselor and c3 she's been to two meetings have there been more than two meetings or is there only two meetings no there have been more because council peckham originally was before like when since you've taken there's only been two meetings uh there were let me think that i'm gonna go out and let them say there may have been three i may have it wasn't you missed one because you had a funeral

that's right i had a funeral i did miss one thank you but to while you're on the committee counselor at seat seven asked the administration for that list of items just in case anything went to the administration and not to arbor or has gone to the arbor committee long before council dion was on it is that correct yeah and again it goes back to the conversation about the wanting to look at using the bristol county

arbor money and that that's where it all originally started just understanding of what's already been asked for what are some ideas that maybe have not been addressed yet that we could as a council look into look into and address and learn more about that's where the this whole thing started got it madam clerk so on the motion to recommend that the appropriation orders for the fiscal year 2023 budget

council has to be ejected counselors kadeem yes camara no dion yes kilby no palatier herrera proposal washington no president liberty lebeau yes the motion fails anything further for veterans see nothing the council's going to take 15 minute recess thank you city council committee on finance back in session next item on the agenda is general government oh no i'm sorry administrative services

city administration human resources management information systems law and purchasing okay okay drawing your attention to page 103 of the budget um this is the city administrator and grant writer uh you'll notice that there is a reduction in that budget um largely because the position of city administrator in fy 22 was budgeted for 152 000 uh i because i like being here so much do the job for the low low price of 130

000 that's the savings does anyone have any questions about the city administrator's budget good luck thank you sir you feel underpaid not at all all right does anyone have any questions about city ministry no okay getting us to human resources um director mcelini is here i'll ask him to come to the table if that's okay as you can see there is a increase in salaries that is an additional human resources

generalist that mr mcelini uh is i believe seeking to hire uh and he can speak to that and correct me if i'm wrong no that's correct so i'm looking to add a position to the department uh currently it is myself and then three other staff members uh one hr assistant one hr generalist and one employee benefits administrator i'm looking to add a second generalist position um as it currently operates now both of uh

both the hr journalists and the hr assistant sort of function in the hr generalist role uh 10 years ago there was a lot of distinction between those two roles and now they they've absorbed most of the same duties i also say 10 years ago because a lot has changed in the department in 10 years and our staffing levels haven't really reflected those changes so um you don't have this in front of you

but our health insurance budget we're actually paying slightly less which is just about the same no slightly less than we were in fy12 so we've made a lot of changes in our department uh we've done a lot with plan design we've been very proactive about carving out different benefits to look for reductions where we can but um a side effect of that is we have a lot of additional workload as part of that

so we've been able to manage but uh i'd like to add a staff member so that we can actually progress we can start doing things that have been neglected wellness to help reduce our claims um sorry go through my notes for a second uh there's other international drug programs that we can add we can do more outreach on the benefits that we do have so i think there's a lot of ways

that we can really bring down claims and then the department can focus on other things or i can focus on other things like training which we haven't done in some time so i'm really looking to round up the department with the added position thank you counselor seat seven counselor proposal mr mclean just to clarify you're looking to to fill the vacancy of the hr assistant or you're looking to add

another generalist i'm looking to add another list okay so the position that is vacant for hr assistant are you still looking to fill that or is that going to i am so i'm looking to fill that at a lesser salary than it is now um it would be more clerical so like i said right now the person in that position mostly operates as an hr generalist but i would like somebody to come in at a

more clerical level so that they can free up both generalists to do um more of the the heavy load so some of that can prep enrollment forms that can deal with uh phone calls coming in intake um can reach out for um a lot of our employees especially during cove that have filled out a lot of stuff on their own without sitting with someone in my department especially on the school side so we get

a lot of paperwork back that's not correct it's not complete and it ties up a lot of time for the employees in my office so anything that could help reduce that workload so that they can function better would be makes a lot more efficient and how many employees essentially just does your department represent um so there's four in my department now but you mean actual employees so school

departments separate from us they have their own separate hr we handle just the personnel for them so it would just be the general anyone in the city side so um ballpark 800 850 employees but as far as insurance goes i mean we have an insurance base of uh almost 7 000 so between seven thousand seventy five hundred um that my office is the primary point of contact for those retirees employees

dependents spouses um it's all going through my office okay thank you i yield thank you council counseling c3 council vice president dion hi good evening how are you um i know prior to um you become the director um you were doing work as a workers comp claims adjuster did that work carry over with you did you bring that back to hr no we're so workers comp has always been handled by the law department um so now

that that work is still done by the law department okay and you're only adding the one position you're going to go from four to five total correct correct yes and then you do have one person that's that's uh a six thousand one hundred and twenty eight dollar raise correct so what my intent is to have that those two positions be exactly the same okay with that i yield thank you concern c4

council kilby yes just so by way of congratulations once again nick i was always impressed uh with uh your knowledge your work ethic and and your personality thank you even when i first met you you know at first i thought you were sean kadeem's brother but i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but i actually get get that a lot that people thought oh yeah but i thought right like the property

i yield and then sorry about the joke it's getting a little late anything else on human resources a counselor in seat six nick what is the medical exam fees so they range based on so all of our pre-employment physicals for any new hires mostly labor positions um they're going to range based on whether it's just general labor or if it's a cdl um but that's a fixed rate we go through

work for drug testing uh it's included in the pre-employment physical yes okay and advertising is not going up uh no so we've we've managed to stay under um we've actually used more advertising this last year than we normally have uh it's done through the mma um or typically mma or indeed we try and stay with mma because it is um focused on municipalities um but you know i'd i'd like to avoid that we've just had more

vacancies uh in the last year than we have in the past and your dues and memberships got reduced yeah i wasn't you it was at 750 before 775. the only two that i'd be interested in are already re-upped for the mma which it's just a really essential resource to be part of and then the other one is shrm which i'm not part of yet uh but i'd like to leave it open because they

do have a lot of resources if if mma doesn't come through i'm not sure what else it was budgeted in for before that now as part of human resource director you deal with mis yes do you find that there's something we could do at mis that would help your department as well as in information systems yeah well um that's going to go through uh city administrator aiken for right now um he would oversee the mis department

but i mean for job openings things like that in this city no job openings no there are other things through the mis department and munis that we're looking to use and this is again part of why i'd like more staffing like employee self-service is something that we want to implement it all takes manpower to do people applying online people who i've had lots of people covet has affected with mental health wise

and you talked about a wellness you'd like to do more with wellness you have the employees training system or the employees if someone is struggling we have the employee assistance program through south coast hospitals yep and we also where is that on here um so that would be in other professional services okay but that went down that decreased that was my my question do you find that you're able

to get counselors get somebody uh ron pelosi at the program is excellent um i mean we had an issue come up on thursday it's one phone call to ron that person's in on friday great good to hear that thank you with that i yield thank you anything more on human resources nope not for me thank you very much thank you thank you nick so it's ten o'clock does the council wish to continue

nope 10 o'clock that was it that's what we said and i'm good so we do have corporation council who sat here all night and his section is up next actually if i may uh they're going to mis is up next and not here tomorrow yes we're not going to put them on another day next tuesday next week

we do have minutes to accept in full council like to go in right into full council yes

yes

i found it

city council now coming to order madam clerk counselors kadeem camara dion here kilby paletier pereira here proposal washington here president of liberty libeau here person went 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 empathy for those present and are deeply acknowledged and permissible everybody in the chamber will please rise for a moment of silence please keep in mind um council belt ismo i remain standing for salute to the flag i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america into the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and

justice for all

madam president the first item before you is citizens input for which we didn't receive any we also don't have any committee reports at this time um so if would you like to entertain a motion for the approval of public hearings yes please motion submit second second motion approved made by councillor pozo seconded by counselor kadeem any discussion all those in favor any opposed so voted

those were the public hearing minutes was the meeting held may 10th the next set of minutes are for the committee on finance held april 26 2022.

motion emotion approved made by council reposa seconded by kelsey kadeem any discussion all those in favor any opposed it's about it the next set of minutes left for the committee on finance held may 10th 2022 motion motion adopt made by councillor proposal second by council team any discussion all those in favor aye any opposed so it and the last item are minutes for the regular meeting of the city council held

may 10 2022. promotion motion approved made by council raposo seconded by councillor kilby any discussion all those in favor aye any opposed sing so voted motion to adjourn second emotional journey made by councillor raposo seconded by councillor kelly all those in favor aye aye any post counsel is adjourned

you