By Tracy F. Seelye, Express editor
editor@whitmanhansonexpress.com
WHITMAN – The Select Board hear – and expressed – concerns over the financial impact of changes to the host community agreement concerning retail cannabis business Berkley Botanicals, and over the effect of increased interest rates on the Whitman Middle School project at the board’s meeting on Tuesday, July 23.
“We recently heard from one of the holders of the host community agreement license – Berkley Botanicals, hoping to open a recreational marijuana store on Bedford Street – that the Cannabis Control Commission had rejected the host community agreement with the town of Whitman,” said Select Board member Justin Evans. “The short explanation for why is that, after we adopted the … agreement with Berkley Botanicals, as well as our other two licensees, the regulations changed.”
That left Whitman’s agreement with Berkely signed before the date of effective regulations with the state.
There are a couple of options open to the town, he said.
Town Administrator Mary Beth Carter outlined those options:

• Resubmit the existing host community agreement with a new effective date;
• Amend the existing HCA in a way that the town’s and Berkley’s lawyers negotiate and agree is “minimally compliant” with the law;
• Adopt the model HCA with modifications – adding some of the existing HCA provisions into the model;
• Adopt the model HCA. There are meaningful differences between the existing Whitman HCA and the model; or
• Waive the HCA requirement.
  Town counsel has made no recommendations about which option the town opts for, he is looking for direction from the board. The one recommendation he did make was to reject the last option.
  Evans recommended agreeing to the model HCA to get the business open. He said the town could use the revenue. He also noted that Whitman has spent a ‘fair amount of money’ negotiating with the business – as well as two others – and the town is effectively throwing that money away in signing the model agreement.
  The Select Board opted to table the matter until its Aug. 20 meeting in the absence of town counsel, ZBA Chair John Goldrosen and Select Board Chair Dr. Carl Kowalski. Evans said he would support drafting some points to discuss at that meeting.
  “There would likely be some benefit to adopting the model with some modifications, but it would likely get approved down the line somewhere not as quickly,” Evans said.
  There is also a provision in Whitman’s HCA that, if a more favorable agreement is reached between the town and any cannabis business, the town would reach out to the others and renegotiate their HCAs, he added.
  “We’ve seen very little progress with two of them and quite a lot of agreement in one of them – the one that’s reaching out to us to get open soon, so I think we may ‘feel out’ if the other two businesses are still interested in pursuing recreational marijuana dispensaries in town, or if they may want to turn their licenses back in,” Evans said. “That might be a side benefit of changing our HCA.”
  Putting it off for another six months or so does not benefit the community, either, he said.
  “What we’ve heard so far is that … the CCC has released the model and are only accepting the model to approve,” Evans said. “The thoughts of Berkley Botanicals’ lawyer is that, if the town were to adopt the model HCA and sign the agreement with them or waive the requirement that there’s an HCA – they’d get approved within the next round.”
  That round of agreements is expected to be approved in the next 90 days, Evans said.
  “If we did anything else, [town counsel] opinion, or perhaps gut feeling, was that they would reject it and, initially, we would have to submit some reason for why.”
  That could delay things yet another 90 days, he explained.
  The major differences, according to town counsel were a lot of zoning controls relating to noise, smell, Evans reported. He said he likes the timeline for effectiveness, which removes community impact hearings and vehicle management requirements.
  “Those are the kinds of things we put in to be over-protective that aren’t in the model HCA,” he said. “I know something that was close to [Select Board member Shawn Kain] when we were negotiating it, was some of the specific community impacts that we carved into our HCA to say, ‘This is something the town considers a community impact,’ they agreed to it, and would have theoretically mad it easier to have made it easier to collect for impacts they are having to the town that other, non-marijuana related businesses have not had on the community.”

Whitman Middle School interest rates
“Why I’m here is because I’m still following [the Middle School] meetings and trying to stay up with the information and over the last couple of months I’ve heard a lot of positive information from the middle school,” Galvin said
In a discussion not included on the agenda, the board heard questions raised by resident John Galvin concerning interest rate’s impact on the bottom line.
Galvin had served on the Whitman Middle School Building Committee, resigning when he no longer supported the project.
“But that’s not why I’m here,” he said, outlining his concern, despite good news he’s heard on the project’s budget. “The concern that I have is not the cost of the project, but the cost of the borrowing for the project.”
The building committee has been able to bond the amount of money that had arrived at this year and the interest rate that came along with that financing “is not pretty,” he said.
“It’s considerably higher than what we just recently borrowed for the DPW building,” he said. “I think it’s important that this board makes it a concern as well, because if we continue along this track, it’s my understanding that next year we will probably do another similar bond to what we did and then, the year after that, the big bond hits.”
Ending up borrowing against the same interest rate being paid now would cost taxpayers a “significant amount of money,” Galvin said, noting his rough calculations put that cost at almost $25 million more over 30 years for the same building if the bond percentage stays at the interest rate the district is now getting.
He also mentioned the district audit that both towns are demanding.
“I don’t know where that stands, but I would plead that both towns move forward with that as quickly as possible, because it’s not looking pretty right now with the borrowing for the Whitman Middle School,” he said.
Asked for a comment by Salvucci, Carter said she is very aware of the BAN taken out – expected to be at $4 million at 4 percent, the BAN the Schools took was $8 million at 5.87 percent, because more money had been needed up-front.
“Once [the towns] get both of their audits done, hopefully they’ll have their bond rating reinstated, allowing them to move forward with a more favorable rate,” she said, noting she has been told no additional borrowing until, at least, after the first of the year.
Salvucci – noting the Moody rating is down because the incomplete audits increased interest rates – asked, if a special Town Meeting would be required, should interest rates go up.
“Town Meeting voted the amount of the project,” Carter said. “The amount of the project they should stay on track with, however, the interest rate they applied to that project does make a difference in the end result to the taxpayers. … They’re waiting for a new cashflow for the financial adviser to update the strategy and planning on borrowing.”
Salvucci also asked if any consideration has been give toward making the project smaller.
Kain expressed hope that, after the audits are complete, the project can be “back on tract and rectified, adding that the issue “Is definitely on our radar.”

By Tracy F. Seelye, Express editor
editor@whitmanhansonexpress.com
WHITMAN – The Select Board heard a proposal for a new formula with the goal of creating a process that is “transparent, clearly defined and easy to understand” – a process that is fair to both the Whitman-Hanson Regional School District and to town departments and must be responsive to current data.
The 5-percent rule that emerged from the Madden Report, while transparent, was not that easy to understand, according to board member Shawn Kain, adding that while it was something discussed with financial consultant John Madden, he never actually included it in the report and guidance on how it should be implemented by the town.
“What I had hoped would have led to cleaning up the budget process with the school department, actually, I think, clouded the issue and made things really difficult,” he said. “Having a stagnant 5 percent doesn’t seem to capture the complexities of our budgets.”
Kain said he intended for own formula should also be a starting point for discussion.
The first step is to project revenue.
“We’ve done this over the last couple of years and I think we’re getting better at doing it,” he said.
The second step to Kain’s formula is calculating a 2 ½ percent increase for all departments, including the schools. In what he termed “Step 3A,” if there is a surplus, additional revenue, recurring revenue excluding one-time funds above 2 ½ percent, “the amount allocated to WHRSD will be proportional to the percent of the general fund expenditures that is spent on education,” currently about 50 percent.
“To me this is the baseline to calculate what we can raise the 2 ½ percent over what we raised the year before,” he said. “This is based on recurring revenue, not based on one-time revenue, which was a little bit of a bone of contention this last year.”
In deficit years, the percentage of decreases would also be felt equally until the budget is balanced.
“By no means is it the end-all, be-all – it’s just a starting point,” Kain said, as he provided the budget update during the Tuesday, July 23 meeting, focusing on the school assessment formula and the system through which the town monitors financial trends.
“The two do complement each other,” he said.
Kain said he was an advocate for hiring Madden, whose recommendations the town has been using as the basis for budgeting decisions.
“The process opened up a lot of healthy dialog, and his recommendations have really helped [us] move in the right direction,” Kain said. “For that, we should be grateful, but this last budget cycle has surfaced a vulnerability in our financial policy, specifically with the school assessment.”
While Madden’s information was a good starting point for moving the town in the right direction, according to Kain, but a lack of clarity and specificity has hindered completion of the budget process.
“For this reason, I’m proposing that we develop a new formula,” he said.
That need not be very complex, he said, especially since officials need to clearly communicate the budget challenges to the people of Whitman, assuring voters that they are working to improve the budget process.
“We want the people to know there is integrity behind our decisions,” he said, adding he was sharing the information to gauge the board’s support for those efforts.
“Hopefully, this is the start of a healthy conversation that will lead to a meaningful solution,” he said.

Financial trend monitoring
Town Administrator Mary Beth Carter, Assistant Town Administrator Kathleen Keefe, Finance Chair Kathleen Ottina and Kain met with financial consultant Zachary Blake from the state Division of Local Services on Tuesday, July 9 as part of a Community Compact Best Practice Grant the town received to help with making improvements in that area.
Blake and his team will help the town implement a financial trend monitoring system and to develop a financial forecast.
“He already has lots of data from Whitman though the Department of Revenue, and we are planning on developing a usable report for the fall,” Kain said. “This report will be essential for us to strategically address the upcoming budget.”
The monitoring system is intended to monitor factors that identify the financial condition of a community, arranging them into a more rational order so they can be more easily analyzed and measured, he explained. The goal is to predict and prepare so the town is better able to prepare for fiscal distress in order to prevent fiscal crisis.
The town of Northborough uses the system.
Select Board member Justin Evans said Kain’s presentation represented a great first start.
“The 5 percent has not necessarily been the easiest to stick to either for the town or for the schools,” he said. “It was a number based on some work that John Madden did a couple of years ago, but it’s time to rethink it.”
He agreed completely with steps 1 and 3.
“Finding a way to divide new revenue is the right way to do it,” Evans said. “I’m a little concerned in Step 2, because whenever the Select Board talks about 2 ½ percent to the schools and when the Finance Committee about 2 ½ percent to the schools, it’s not necessarily the same as the School Committee talking about 2 ½ percent budget growth.”
He noted that a 2 ½ increase in the assessment to the schools allows them to increase their budget to grow between 1 and 1 ½ percent, while permitting 2 ½ percent budget growth for the district, it breaks it away from Prop 2 1/2.
“That immediately takes some of our new revenue every year, but I think it puts a more equitable start to that system,” he said. “General government can grow 2 ½ percent, School Department can grow 2 ½ percent, new revenue above those parts can be divided up somehow, but that probably does lock us in somewhere around a 5-ish – 4- to 5-percent assessment increase every year until the schools come out of hold-harmless.”
School Committee member Rosemary Connolly thanked Kain for his work and said the regional agreement gives away the town’s educational rights under Chapter 71 and that training new school committee members take had stressed that the article at town meeting which tried to separate the two budgets was not legal.
“They had just come down, hot off the presses, with what they said, so I’m concerned that this gives the impression that we actually have control of this,” she said. “There is a financial process that we’re supposed to do to insulate and that is come to the assessor first, and at my end on the School Committee have a good sense of where we’re going … early in the fall.”
She advocated asking how much something is going to cost before talking about what the town has to spend.
“We’re going to have a big jump in the vocational, but it isn’t an unusual cost, when you spread it out and say ‘what is everybody paying for it,’” she said. “We may have to look at what did we overpay to another community and how can we get that [$4.5 million] back and then move forward in some sort of trending more appropriately.”
Kain said he does not want to send the message that Whitman is trying to develop a formula to coerce Hanson into a budget formula rather he was striving for a formula they could agree on.
“What I’d like to do is develop a budget formula that we can agree upon early in the budget process so that, when it comes time to actually compute the budget, we’re all on the same page,” he said. “I believe we are partners.”
Ottina said Kain has kept her informed and up-to-date on the proposal.
“Having this discussion in July is a lot better than having it in April,” she said.
School Committee member Dawn Byers, also of Whitman, asked if the Superintendent of Schools or School Committee was aware of the meeting, noting she had attended because she noted a budget presentation on the agenda.
“I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I’m disappointed that the agenda itself wasn’t more clear that, in fact, you’re talking about the school assessment,” she said.
She agreed with Ottina that this is a good time to be discussing next year’s budget, but noted Northborough’s budget may be different to W-H school deficit may be much different than it appears based on the budgeting formula.

HANSON – The Select Board on Tuesday, July16 grapples with the need to communicate the necessary operational override for the town next year, with the apparent logical conflict of spending ARPA funds to do it.
The good news, they were told as they met virtually with consulting firm Capital Strategic Solutions, was that those leftover federal funds are in an account that can only be used for municipal government purposes. The firm’s officials pledged to fine-tune cost estimates of about $50,000 plus an anticipated $5,000 for mailers – down to the $49,000 to $50,000 without an added cost for voter information mailers.
At the same time, they had another communication issue on their hands.
“We now sound like we’re on the Starship Enterprise,” Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett said as she welcomed them to the meeting as an intermittent echo reverberated through the meeting room. “I have no way to control it.”
Whitman Hanson Community Access Television production assistant Paul Watson worked throughout the meeting to correct the problem.
Capital CEO Nicole Figueiredo led the presentation, which the Mass.-based, certified women-owned business specializing in municipal engagement and other forms of public administration, community engagement and project management – among other specialties – spoke to the firm’s expertise in Hanson’s need for explaining the need for an operational override for the town next year.
“Some of the key objectives in doing outreach and engagement for an override is explaining what an override is and outlining the specific needs the override will address, whether it’s funding for public safety, infrastructure and schools, etc.,” Figueiredo said.
While the Select Board has been emphasizing the need for such outreach, they also expressed concern about the cost.
“Your development of educational materials [is important], but then there’s an additional service for direct mailers, which would be delivering the educational materials to the townspeople,” Vice Chair Ann Rein said. “That’s an extra five grand. I noticed that – that wouldn’t come out of the cost of the contract.”
Figueiredo granted that would be an additional cost.
“That’s why I’m talking about costs, because we’ve been down this road before,” Select Board member Joe Weeks said. “[We] thought we had the costs figured out, and then, come to find out, it wasn’t what we thought it was. That’s why I want to be very clear what this is, because it’s going to be, already, a hard sell if we’re asking people for an override, by spending $15,000 that we say we don’t have to spend.”
“Which makes no sense,” Board member Ed Heal said.
Rein said Capital did a marvelous job getting the town social media running properly, proving themselves worth the money, but the question is, does the town have the money.
Town Administrator Lisa Green said leftover ARPA funds from the treasury bucket could be used for Capital’s costs as a general government services expense.
“That’s why we’re even talking about this,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said.
Michael Gallagher, a professional consultant with Capital Strategic Solutions, is a retired administrator in North Attleboro where he participated in the town’s change of government and a recent Proposition 2 ½ override.
“We were able to get an override passed because of the outreach we had done,” he said, noting he has a lot of experience in both the public and private sector.
“One of the things that was very important and a key to the process was part of our public outreach and making sure we were very open and had a plan in place,” Gallagher said of his experience in North Attleboro. “We also did a lot of making sure we were very specific about where every dollar went.”
He and the North Attleboro Select Board had provided a spreadsheet where every expenditure was outlined down to the dollar to show where the override would be spent for the following three years, he said.
Figueiredo agreed that municipal finance can be very challenging to explain to residents.
“We highlight the benefits and address the potential concerns,” she said, adding that press releases, the town website, media channels and community meetings are leaned on to get the word out.
Feedback from the community during the process is really important, Figueiredo said.
“You don’t really know what your community members do understand and don’t understand about an override,” she said. Both representatives of Capital Strategic Solutions have override experience under their belts.
They start with data-gathering centering on historical revenue and expense information, which they described as critical, then they can do projections on “what it might look like without any type of revenue enhancement through an override,” building their strategic plan on how the town intends to use that information.
“If you show them what’s happening to their town – because it is their town, it’s their money – people understand when you show them all the data,” he said.
“You’re giving them ownership on how these funds are being spent,” Figueiredo agreed.
As the town moves into the voting phase, providing maximum access to that information ensures people know what they are voting for, encouraging as many people as possible to vote, regardless of which side of the question they favor.
Weeks, satisfied that leftover ARPA funds could be used for the voter education project, asked if there wasn’t a more pressing need in town for that $50,000 wallet.
“I have to ask the question, because someone’s going to kick me if I don’t,” he said.
“The most important thing is to collect the data and get the information out there,” Green said. “Given the staffing in the office, we can’t do this alone, we really need the support of Capital Strategic Solutions, where they have people who have been through this process, that have a lot more insight – this is what they do every day.”
FitzGerald-Kemmett also responded to Week’s question about whether there are more important uses for the money.
“I don’t think there is,” she said. “We are at a critical crossroads here, and if this does not happen, we are looking at catastrophic cuts – not just town government, but schools – the whole way across. This is it. … This year, we felt a little bit of the pinch and next year, we’re going to feel the full blow.”
She also pointed out that residents often complain about rising tax rates.
“No,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “The tax rate has not been raised. Your value of your property has increased because that’s what property values do. The tax you are paying is based on the value of your property.”
The Board of Assessors sets the property values based on state formulas, not haphazardly does.
“I wish they would realize they could work with us,” Rein said. “We all have to work through this. It is not an easy thing to do.”
Weeks said that, while he agrees the outreach is one of the only permitted uses for these ARPA funds, he wanted to ensure the cost would not increase.
“I just want to make sure that that $50,000 doesn’t turn into $100,000 or $75,000 and then we’re pulling it out of free cash,” he said.
“If we hold the budget, I think it’s a good thing,” Rein said.
Figueiredo said Capital’s goal is to work side by side with Green and the board to help them communicate the financial health of the community, its revenue sources and expenditures, and develop the strategic plan to get out before the voters.
“We’re going to provide the support services they need that they don’t [already] have,” Figueiredo said. “A lot of communities that do overrides have a lot of staff.”
They will review the data and financial reports with Green and develop a game plan for how the override revenue is going to get back to the community in a positive light, as well as what would happen if an override failed – from impacts on snow plowing and public safety to infrastructure permits that communities need.
“That’s the backbone of your community right there,” she said.
The town’s financial health – revenue sources, expenditures and capital projects – will also be reviewed in order to develop a comprehensive voter education and engagement plan, including meetings and forums with community members.
FitzGerald-Kemmett characterized the plan as “a little bit vague” in terms of numbers the town stands to receive and she asked Capital to reconsider – after seeing what officials have already done with other consultants hired with ARPA money to do some fiscal forecasting.
“I’d like to see the mailer included in the $49,000,” she said. “Clearly, we have to do a mailer and we don’t have another $5,000 kicking around. That may be the only way to reach all these people.”
Figueiredo agreed to re-examine that and come back at another meeting or otherwise submit a clear, concise plan for what they need to do in terms of public meetings and the number or mailers needed.
“I think we’d like more meat on the bones in terms of a project plan and timeline, with costs,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “We’re really excited about our staff … and us having support in trying to educate people and get the facts out there.”