HANSON – As the voters of Hanson get down to business for the Tuesday, Oct. 7 special Town Meeting, they will face differing opinions from town boards and committees on how to return hours to some town employees while balancing the budget.
One thing on which there is agreement, however, is free cash.
“It’s seemingly uncontroversial, which I’ve now just called the universe in on us,” Select Board Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett said after a review of the on Tuesday, Sept. 24.
“You did, because you didn’t look [to your] left before you went there,” said Board member Joe Weeks, asking Town Accountant Eric Kinsherf for the total amount of free cash is being deferred to Town Meeting?.
He was trying to determine – if all the budget-balancing things in the warrant that are going to hold the town to salaries and benefits that the town voted against funding in May – how much will that put the town in a hole by funding them now?
“One of the things I’m very much against is balancing the budget using free cash,” Weeks said. “A lot of the things we’ve decided to defer as a Select Board to Town Meeting [were] things that are going to balance the budget using free cash, which is a huge difference from using free cash to fund capital items and things along those lines.”
He expressed a fear that “the budget is going to get away from us, especially given in May, where we were supposed to do budget-related things, it’s going to put us deeper and deeper into the hole without anybody realizing it.”
Kinsherf said he and Town Administrator Lisa Green sat down to do a pre-Town Meeting overview of what will be needed in FY 2026 to fund the budget without free cash, and the town will be about $2 million short.
“At the end of this Town Meeting, if all the articles pass, I think we’re going to have [about] $2.3 to $2.4 million left,” he said. “So, it’s a policy decision.”
Kinsherf said that, ideally, we’d have an extra $2 million in revenue over so, and do an override or something and we be in a nice position having $2.4 million of untapped free cash we could use in capital or whatever. That’s a business that you could be in, but what happens when you have free cash available to you in May will allow you a little bit of one-stop Band-Aid … you see where we’re going with this.”
To keep the morale high would cost about $13,000, he said.
“It’s a decision on your part,” Kinsherf concluded.
Weeks said it wasn’t normal to fund articles one year only to cut them back the next.
“If we’re going to do it, I want to do it for the right reasons, not because people are asking us.”
Kinsherf said, if all the articles were funded, he could almost guarantee they would be cut in May.
“We haven’t said we’ve found extra money,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “We’re saying we took another look at the money we have and, given the fallout from Town Meeting, we’re saying that a judicious amount of money – $100,000 , which is not material in the grand scheme of what we’re looking at overall – could make a huge difference in the services that we’re able to give and in the morale of the staff that we have here.”
She said the voters would ultimately decide whether we’ve made the case or not.
Vice Chair Ann Rein said she was “a little surprised about the amount of free cash.”
She said she was thrilled with it.
“I don’t see, really, the problem with spending that small amount to restore services,” she said. “I think that services are something we have to think of as more important than capital projects,”
Both Weeks and FitzGerald-Kemmett agreed.
“That’s my point,” Weeks said.
High Street Park
In other business, the High Street Park Committee updated the board on that project.
Planner Anthony DeFrias said the committee has worked with him to finalize the plan. The Park Committee asked him to reach out to engineers and make recommendations on who to hire a peer review to assess the design to ensure it is meeting all state and federal regulations.
The board voted to empower the Committee to work with Green on finding an engineering firm to conduct the peer review.
It also has to go before the Planning Board, which has required the peer review.
“If we require that from residents, we should also require it for our own projects, DeFrias said.
He has also sought estimates from three companies – and the committee has earmarked money to pay for the peer reviewer.
The design, which DeFrias reviewed for the Select Board will go before the Planning Board for a public hearing, probably at the end of October, and includes basketball courts, a playground, a dog park, amphitheater for concerts or other performances, walking trails and open lawn area.
Plantings intended to mitigate the impact on abutters’ privacy, which had already been expressed, have been planned.
“Because of the cost, there’s going to be phases, so this could be a project that goes over a period of years,” DeFraias said.
The lowest bid for the peer review was for $3,950. A mid-range bid was $4,000 and the high bid was for more than $12,000.
“We’re going to go with the lowest person, Alan D. Majors, because they had a very good, detailed, estimate,” he said. The committee had also asked DeFrias to get an equipment estimate for the playground, which did not require a quote because he said they’re not even close to that, but estimates on the general cost to kit out a playground would be from $39,000 to $125,250.
“I think it’s a destination place, the way it’s getting laid out right now,” Weeks said, but I do think it was laid out strategically well in that it puts minimal issue with abutters, but again, I’m not an abutter, so I can’t speak for them.”