HANSON – Town and school district officials have been talking, and – while the school budget gulf has not yet been bridged – there is a clearer focus on the budget picture.
As the Select Board reviewed the warrant on Tuesday, April 2, Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett sounded a note of cautious optimism that the gap could be bridged, or an override to span that difference would be needed. Last week the frustration over the school budget was strong [see stroy below].
Vice Chair Joe Weeks, during the warrant articles review, suggested the board not vote on recommending non-financial articles until next week.
“Does it make sense to put off this conversation until we actually know how much money we’re going to have?” he said. “Wouldn’t this conversation be better to have next week once FinCom has gone through their recommendations?”
They proceeded through the review voting only to place several financial articles until the Tuesday, April 9 meeting.
Select Board Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett, noting that “diplomacy is not my forte,” described the meeting she attended with Superintendent of Schools Jeff Szymaniak, School Committee Chair Beth Stafford and Whitman Select Board Chair Dr. Carl Kowalski on Monday, April 1.
“We may be having additional conversations about the school assessment and where that is by next week, which potentially could be at a different place than it is right now,” she said.
Weeks said without a firm number on several articles, “a lot of this is guessing.”
FitzGerald-Kemmett said the board could either place and recommend non-monetary articles, place everything and remove any articles, not supported before the warrant closes. The board did, however, vote to place and recommend an article that increases zoning fines to give them more bite.
The board opted to place everything that had no monetary effect. It was in keeping with a caution sounded by Finance Committee Chair Kevin Sullivan.
“I imagine we’ll be preparing for the worst and stripping a lot of things that we’d like to do out of the articles,” Sullivan said as his committee prepared to review the warrant. “We will not be recommending a large majority of things we can put off.”
FitzGerald-Kemmett asked if the lens they might be looking through is different if the school assessment were to come down or did Sullivan still feel it would be problematic.
“I think we need a safety net, always, so I still think there are things we’re going to not recommend in the articles as well as we’re still going to make cuts to the budget,” Sullivan said. “Not enough to overcome the deficit, but enough to trim things out of the current budget that are ‘nice to haves.’”
The board voted to place the article but has not yet voted on whether to recommend it.
Balancing the budget, on paper, will take using $858,000 in free cash and keeping the schools at a 5-percent increase Kinsherf said. There would be $248,000 left in free cash if that scenario proves accurate.
“We can balance the budget as we currently have it,” he said. “The thought was that next [thing] we’d be thinking of is an override above the 5 percent that the schools want.”
“We’re not going to recommend paying more than 5 percent,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “We are at 5 percent. We are not moving beyond 5 percent.”
That said, she described the meeting with Whitman and school officials as having created an “understanding among everybody that, really, the towns are in a tough position” and can’t go above the 5 percent assessment increase without a school override.
“It would still be more of a partnership and much appreciated if the School Committee could take another look at the assessment that they’ve given to the towns and they have taken that under advisement and they will take it back to their School Committee,” she said. “It was a cordial conversation, everybody understood where everybody else was coming from [and] we basically said 5 percent is where it’s at.”
During that conversation, FitzGerald-Kemmett recalled that Szymaniak made a good point that “our 5 percent increase on their assessment really translates to a 3.8 percent increase” to the schools because the assessment is only a portion of the budget.
“Regardless of what we hear back from the School Committee, unless they say, ‘We’re going to go straight 5 percent, which I’m not anticipating is going to happen,” … we’re going to have a school override for the delta between the 5 percent and whatever the assessment is,” she said. “Whitman is doing the same thing.”
While she is hoping that the override is reduced and would go a long way toward helping people feel that at least some work has been done and “some ownership and mutual respect has been exhibited by everybody trying to work together on this.”
“It truly is a math problem,” she said. “Nobody was able to commit, I didn’t commit to anything, we just talked.”
Select Board member Ed Heal asked if they had to know how an override would look and if anything was being drafted.
Language for the article is preliminary according to Green who added it would be reorganized after the school district’s decision.
“Until a vote is taken by the School Committee, we ought not to be putting anything into our [warrant],” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “I don’t think we should have a dollar amount at all in this. We know, if it’s anything in excess of 5 percent, whatever that dollar amount is will be in here.”
The choice is sticking to 5 percent or doing a school override for the delta between the two numbers, she said.
Schools are far from the only budget the Select Board is concerned about.
Town Administrator Lisa Green said the town also has, within the articles for the special Town Meeting Warrant, the ability to use ARPA funds for an $85,000 pond management study, for example, which could be tabled until October. The board agreed to delete that article from the May Town Meeting warrant.
Other financial
articles
The board also placed and recommended the Camp Kiwanee budget article, which largely shifts funds from retained earnings to the budget plan, according to Camp Kiwanee Commission Chair Frank Milisi. Town Accountant Eric Kinsherf echoed that by noting $50,000 would be transferred from receipts and the remainder from retained earnings.
“At the end of the day, we will have the side-by-side comparison of what the [Select Board] recommends and what FinCom recommended,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said.
The board had to cut the $15,000 article for an animal shelter renovation that was planned in addition to boosting the animal control officer to a full-time position. The board has discussed in depth earlier this year that the ACO has driven animals to the Lakeville shelter, which takes upwards of 40 minutes for a round-trip or brings animals, especially livestock, to his own property.
Weeks concerned about the potential liability of the ACO taking animals home.
“To me, I would like to see this handled as a project plan,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “I feel it needs flushing out.”
She tasked Green with doing more research to obtain solid numbers on the cost in light of Select Board member Ann Rein’s comment that she had toured Hanson’s shelter that day and determined it would likely cost much more than $15,000 to renovate.
“Bring it back in October with a little more meat on the bone,” she said.