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BOARD OF FINANCE PUBLIC HEARING
MINUTES
APRIL 4, 2005
THE Public Hearing was called to order at 7:00 p.m. in the Community Room, Avon Senior Center. Present were Messrs. Harrison, Gugliotti, Hooper, Monts, Speich, Zacchio and Ms. Durdan.
Chairman Tom Harrison: Our procedure tonight will follow the general pattern of the past. We’ll have some presentations with slides on the various portions of the budget. After that, we’ll have questions from the audience and the usual routine is if you’re going to ask a question, please raise your hand. We have a microphone with a podium here if you have notes or material you’d like to rest in front of you, you’re welcome to speak from there or there’s another microphone right behind Peg Colligan who’s sitting there with the slide projector. In either case, we’d ask you please to give your name and tell us where you live. The reason for that is Elinor is tape recording this and in the minutes we keep a record of
everybody who speaks here. What we’re going to do first is, I’m going to ask our Town Attorney, Dwight Johnson, to speak to us about the process. We’ll begin our meetings as we usually do, with the Pledge of Allegiance. (Done). Dwight will now explain the basic processes and procedures.
Dwight Johnson, Town Attorney: Good Evening, Everyone. Most of you have been through this process several times, but I will outline, briefly, the steps that have been taken so far and the steps that will be taken tonight and after tonight. Last year, in accordance with the Charter of the Town, various offices and agencies of the Town began to prepare requested expenditures and projected revenues. The Board of Education, at the same time, started it’s budgetary process. On February 15th of this year each of those offices and agencies and the Board of Education were required to present their proposed budgets to the Town Manager. The Town Manager then spends up to two weeks, under the Charter, until March 1st to present his proposed budget
reflecting the revisions that he recommended to Town agencies and offices, to the Town Council. The Town Manager does not recommend changes in his presentation of the Board of Education’s budget presentation.
The Town Council then considers the information recommended, with changes, by the Town Manager and recommends to the Board of Finance the Town portion reflecting such changes as it made to the Town Manager’s budgets. The Town Council is free to make recommend changes to the Board of Education’s budget, but it cannot, itself, modify that budget. The Board of Finance then is charged, under the Charter, to hold one or more Public Hearings not later than three weeks before the Annual Meeting, to get input from the members, voters, taxpayers. This is one of those Hearings. Following this, the Board of Finance will make the further revisions that it deems appropriate and then recommends a combined budget reflecting both the Town Hall agencies and offices and the Board of Education
to the Annual Town Meeting. As you know, at the Annual Town Meeting the proposed budget is presented and discussed. At the conclusion of that meeting, the Town Meeting is adjourned to a Referendum because the ultimate decision concerning the budget is made by the voters. That ends my comments.
Mr. Harrison: Does anyone have any questions for Dwight? Thank you, Dwight. What we’ll do now is have the presentations of the individual Boards. We alternate the speaking order each year by tradition; this year the Town Council will speak first through Dick Hines, it’s Chairman, then the Board of Education will make it’s budget presentation through Peggy Roell and then we’ll have a brief presentation by the Board of Finance, explaining where we are and how we got here. After that, we will have a period of questions; we will stay here as late as it takes, so don’t feel you have to get your question in the first minutes or you won’t have a chance. We’ll stay as late as necessary. This year what we are going to do is have the first
series of questions that come in after the presentation focused on the Town’s portion of the Budget. When those questions are completed, we’ll take questions then on the Board of Education’s portion of the budget, and then we’ll have it open for anybody who thinks of a second question, or has a general question. We’ll try this out this year to see how it works. Since all three of the Boards will be having presentations that will be projected up here, we’ll step down and get out of the way so we don’t block the screen. First, I’m going to call on Dick Hines, Chairman of the Town Council, to make his presentation.
Dick Hines: Thank you, Tom. First, I’d like to introduce to you the members of the
Town Council: Diane Hornaday, John Carlson, Bill Shea and Joe Woodford. This is a five-member cast. I thought it would be appropriate to advise that all of the department heads, while doing their everyday jobs, they are clearly sincere about doing their jobs at the lowest possible cost. I think over the years this has worked out to be very good. Phil does a great job, and also works with the Town Council. I’m sure he has the same impact on the Board of Finance. This is a summary of our overall budget. The Board of Finance asked us to come in with an operating budget increase of 4.5%, which the Town did. The Debt Service is down slightly this year and that’s based on our plan to try to not have large spikes and try to smooth out the payments each year.
That’s something that’s changed tremendously over the years. In the early days when I was on the Council, the debt service might be 1.5 to 2 million. Well, today, we are almost approaching 5 million, all due to the school projects we’ve had to take on over the years as the population has increased. The Capital Improvement Program is up extensively this year. One of the things I want to talk about later is the reason why I think we have to look at this at a little different basis than we have over the past several years. If we put the Sewer portion, which is actually covered by a sewer fund that doesn’t really enter the budget. On a total basis, we are now at 5.6%.
Let’s talk a little about the pieces; one of the important items is what’s our revenue going to be, other than taxes. We don’t see much change there. If we look at the various formulas for school funding, for road construction, it’s stayed about the same as in the present Governor’s budget. How it ends up, we don’t know. One of the big unknowns is the Real Estate Conveyance Tax, which for the past couple of years has been a real benefit to Avon, some $350,000 was raised outside the property tax. This year, after some revision, it’s proposed to end. I have testified before the legislature; I didn’t get the feeling they were very interested. They make the comments, generally, that they didn’t want to go back on their promise of
saying that it would end at a certain time. They have gone back on many other promises, so why they worry about this one vs. another, I don’t know. I think that’s going to be one problem for the Board of Finance, when they are trying to decide on revenues, whether they can count on this item. Even if they were to reenact it, we wouldn’t get the $350,000, probably more like $200,000 to $250,000, depending on the number of sales we have. Sales vary. It is an item that allows us to raise taxes on the only issue beside the property tax.
Looking at expenditures, obviously personnel is a big piece – it’s over 70% in the Town and I think in the Board of Education it’s up over 80%. We’re very personnel oriented and not equipped to take care of all the buildings we have now to take care of. The Service & Supplies are up a little bit and the Capital Outlay is up a little this year because we’re trying to buy some police cars. This total comes down to 4.5%, as requested by the Board of Finance. When we look at personal services, I mentioned it’s almost 80%. It’s up 4.6%. We are asking for 1 additional full time employee, which is a patrol officer. We also have one opening in the Police Department in a Sergeant position. With those both we would go from the
present 108 employees to 110. One of the things we do in this Town is to try to minimize the number of full time employees. At the moment we have about 108 full time and 117 part time. That eliminates fringe benefits and it definitely keeps our cost down, one of the things we want to continue. On the Capital Outlay, we want to look at purchasing or leasing cars; we are now leasing quite a few police cruisers because we have found the price to be so attractive, it doesn’t pay to buy them. This is not what we said in the past, but we’re saying it now, so we’ll look at it very carefully and decide what we are going to do there. We also are looking for videos for our patrols which are very important. We’ve had some contributions in that area, the whole voice logging unit at the Police Station needs replacement and at Countryside Park, the whole deck needs replacing. Those are the major pieces of that increase.
Under Personnel Service Benefits, there’s some good news here. Under retirement, you can see that defined benefit is coming down and defined contributions is going up. The Town Manager and his staff have come up with some very good labor improvements which help us in this area. Some of the older employees were under defined benefit program and now the younger ones are coming in under defined contributions; that’s going to help us in the long term. In fact, on the whole health care area, a recent agreement with the Police Department is now saying all new employees contribute 20% to the health care, which no other Town in the State of Connecticut being that high. The current highest portion is 15%, so this is a great improvement. When you look at a labor agreement, you have to
look at all the fringe benefits and I think the Town staff did a great job in hiring. Another area down here is retiree health trust, part of those funds are for present people on retirement, and some who will retire in the future. The Government Accounting Standards Board has said you have to put that money aside into a trust fund, so each year we are putting money into that and building up a fund to take care of them because it’s a liability of the future and we have an obligation to those people so we want to make sure we do put that money aside. It’s not a set amount yet, but we’re trying to contribute so when it does become law we don’t have a big increase in our taxes to put money into it. In the Personnel area in the library, this is an interesting area. We operate the library with 7 full time employees and 27 part time. It’s a very efficient way to do it, but not the easiest way, but the staff does a great
job to make that happen. That keeps costs down. There is a little bit of an increase in evenings in the children’s room; right now, one staff member has to cover 4,300 square feet – that’s a pretty big area. In the part time hours, I think it runs to about 3,600 hours. We think this is a high priority item for the library. We’ve been very fortunate recently, in being able to buy two adjacent parcels to take care of future expansion, but that’s probably a few years down the road. We will have the high school expansion first. We never thought we’d be so successful to have the two most important properties become available and we were able to get them. Looking at the Police Department, you can see they’ve been doing a pretty good job in many areas of seeing reductions in burglary, assault, larceny, but there are some other areas that they still have trouble with, narcotics, criminal, motor
vehicle accidents, motor vehicle stops, DWI arrests. You look at that and you can see there’s a lot of work there for the Police Department. If you look at the emergency medical responses, they have been going up quite a bit. That may be because we are seeing an increase in the aging population. Go back to 1990, it was 13% of people 65 or older, now it’s more than 15% in the 2000 censes and it’s probably higher than that now. That’s an area where the police are the first responders. Just calls for services, you can see that going up – you can’t believe the calls the dispatchers receive. There are people calling up to say “How do I get to Walmart?” There are an unbelievable amount of calls and we’re now up to 6 dispatchers; this is a very important job. Our Police Chief and our Captain have worked very hard for the past couple years to look at a regional basis for dispatching – Simsbury and Farmington were interested but have now backed out. Our Police Chief and our Town
were looking for savings there, but it just didn’t work out.
I don’t think we’ll give up, if the opportunity arises again, we’ll look at it, anything to keep the costs down. Based on this, we’ve been working with 16 patrol officers for many years. We are asking for 1 more, now, I think 1 is warranted. When we asked the Police Chief and Captain if we were to give you 1 person, we would like to fill the Patrol Officer – and they both agreed another person out on the street was most important.
We still want to fill the sergeant position, too.
Another area I have some concerns about – what’s happening to our Capital Improvement Program. If we go back into the late 80’s and early 90’s and look at our budgets, we were spending almost 7% on Capital Improvements. We did Town hall renovations, Police Department renovations, we were working on roads, buying fire trucks, doing quite a bit. Due to all the debt increases we’ve had due to school construction, we’ve had to cut that back so now we’re down to a couple of %. This year we feel we have to go to 3%; whether we will be able to do that, I don’t know. I think we have to start looking at our infrastructure and necessary capital improvements and not let everything go toward the debt. We’ve got to kind of balance it, it may cause problems in some other areas, but I think it’s important to point this because we’re falling behind. Look at our Capital Improvement Program, it’s laid out for this year, 5 years and 10 years. If we delay something 1 or 2 years, that problem
is going to get worse. We have some very major capital programs coming down the line that are needed to take care of our school buildings, with new roofs, etc. This is something I’m going to urge the Board of Finance to look at very carefully this time. We just can’t keep cutting this back to take care of the debt without looking at some real problems in the future. Look what’s in our Capital Improvement Program; there’s not much in there. We have not been doing all the improvements we’d like to. We try to do 6 miles a year and we’re not able to do that every year. The State came in and looked at the Town Clerk’s office and said it’s just not adequate, there’s not enough vault space, we have to have some improvements. I think we’re looking at about a 500 sq. ft. addition and we have to decide when to do that. We’ve got other projects we want to work
on, too. The Buckingham fields area, we were very fortunate that the developer is giving us one of the fields up there; we had a State Grant that the school was able to get for the area back of the High School. It didn’t look like it would work out because of wetlands, and we were very fortunate with the help of our State Legislators to get that switched off to Buckingham. As time goes on it’s more expensive than we had planned. Fencing and steel prices are up and we’re going to need more funding. We want to finish that because if all goes well, I’m pretty sure by spring of 2006, those fields will be in shape. The Board of Education’s Pine Grove Roof replacement; that has been a major problem for a long time; we’ve got $300,000 set aside, $200,000 from last year’s budget and $98,000 from Johns Manville who agreed the original roofing was not adequate. I think they gave us something like 1/3 of the
original cost that was only $300,000, now we’re hoping for $600,000, but it may be higher. We want to put in another $300,000 this year. The High School track – it’s been five years since it was built. The best way to maintain that is to constantly do some resurfacing. Maybe it could go another year or so, but you don’t want to go 10 years because then you’ll have major expenses. Those are the types of programs we have to look at in our Capital Program. We don’t want to keep putting these things off when in the long run it’s going to cost more.
Roaring Brook School’s bathrooms; they never did improve the bathrooms when they renovated the school. They are in bad shape, a lot of areas need replacement. On the Town’s side, we have a roadside mower that is used 2 or 3 days week for clearing the sides and it’s not in very good shape. Right now, it’s 18 years old and it’s down quite a bit. We would like to go out and get a used one, but there aren’t many on the market. A Pick-up truck replacement, I think that is 14 years old – it’s starting to go and we’d like to replace it. The dump truck, I believe, is 16 years old, and with a sander and every year we have more miles to plow in Town. We don’t like to have trucks go down because somebody doesn’t get the
service they want. Fortunately we have a good highway staff that does replacements when possible. In the Fire Department, it is the second on their air packs – these are very important because they are lighter weight, they’re compatible, we’re committed to them, we’ve already done half a year and we want to go ahead with this. Those are self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA). The Police Department constantly have new requirements to file their materials. They are getting into some real file problems. They would like to propose a system where they can do things on a more efficient basis and make a change. The Board of Education would like a new pickup truck. With the additional schools, they feel they do not have enough vehicles to do all the work necessary. Town Hall renovations, we’ve been trying to do it through the Capital Program without spending a lot of money. Back in the late 80’s and 90’s we put the whole effort in there and we got it done. We don’t have
enough money right now to do that, so we’re doing it kind of piece meal. We recently had a tour and it’s just a shell until there was some work done recently. We would like to see this completed. We have requirements to bring buildings 5, 6 and 7 up to status, add 1 elevator for the handicapped. There is no place left to hold a meeting. It is extremely crowded. That’s needed. The only way we can finish the others is to put a million in a bond issue. We may have to look into that. The Old Farms bridge replacement and the reconstruction of Old Farms Road is a project we’ve been working on for years. The Old Farms bridge is a very important one, that’s coming down through Fisher Meadows and going up to Waterville Road there is a very steep incline. Joe Woodford told me that years ago, people learning to drive with a standard drive – that’s where they all went! I was there
to day and it’s not the best area. I think the funding is now available. It’s going to be funded complete on a State and Federal basis. We want to keep enough money in each year so we can keep the project in the pipe line so the State and Federal governments will look at that. The reconstruction of Old Farms Road, all the environmental studies have been completed; this has been going around the old farms school and south of the pond. We’re working with CRCOG to make that happen, but it’s important to keep some money in so it looks like the Town is still interested and we don’t lose a future opportunity.
I mentioned earlier we wanted to put $435,000 into the road program; we have a little over 90 miles in Town and we plow about 100,000 miles each year. If you want to keep those roads in good shape, every 15 years you should be surfacing. The Blue area shows 90 miles, that comes to about 6 miles every year. That’s been our goal, but you can see what we have accomplished, we’ve been making progress the last couple of years but this year it’s only 5 miles again. If you look at the green area, those are miles we’re falling behind. This is one item that I want to bring up in the Capital program. If we keep cutting back, these problems are just being put off for the future when reconstruction could be worse. The following roads will be resurfaced in the coming
year, at least that’s what we are proposing. There is a possibility the State will increase some of the cost. The legislature is trying to get more money to the Towns, we might get a little more Town Road Aid, for the schools; if we do maybe we can take advantage of that and do a little better. The dump truck and the roadside mower are top items for the highway department. Back in October they had estimates for those two pieces of equipment. By January they had increased by a considerable amount. We see costs continue to increase. We talked about our trucks, the mower is 18 years old, the dump truck is 16, the pickup is 14 years – what we are trying to do is get our truck fleet so that most of them are less than 10 years or older. We’ve made great progress in the last 10 years, we’re in much better shape than we were 20 years ago. We still have a fleet with quite a few trucks that are older and it’s
a problem to keep them going. The older they are, the more problems we have. One of the big increases in the highway department, fire department and police department is the increase in costs. This is the cost of gasoline the Town pays – you can see the increase. We try to account for these higher rates inn our budgets this year.
Another area that is coming into our whole efforts is mandates on the items that impact the highway department, the public works. On Country Club Road the Town was getting the sand off the road near the catch basins – it was a tremendous effort. There was no sand left. I watched the State come out and do it in front of my house, but there was no comparison. The Town’s doing an excellent job; the sweeping costs have been going up; we eliminated the brush collection last year because that was going up so high. The people who do these jobs, there is only a few weeks you can do it and everybody wants it. We have truck testing, tree rules, basin flushing, when you hear these high whining sounds around Town, that’s from when they clean out all the basins. There are big
increases on things that are mandated; in Avon, when these things happen, we usually follow the law. I’m not sure all the other Towns do. I want to talk about our existing debt. On the chart you can see that we will reach the peak here and as the funding is coming down it allows us to undertake projects for the future such as the High School, the track, the Library expansion and some additional efforts. Here’s how the Town Manager has been working with our consultants to try to handle this so we wouldn’t have major spikes. We are now talking well over 5.5 million dollars for the debt. We will do the High School expansion the same way we have always done it so it should not be too great a burden. That project is probably in the 25 – 26 million dollar project. We should have a better number very shortly as the building committee and the architect are getting an outside organization to come in and give us a better
cost. With the present estimates we think it’s going to cost the Town about 19.5 million. Very preliminary numbers on the library say about 7.5 million; the Rhodes property we bought a couple of years, we’ve been paying that with Bond Anticipation Notes. We want to go out to bond, but it costs so much to bond you want to combine your bonding at one time. We’re going to do it when we go out for the high school bonding. I spoke earlier about buildings 5, 6 and 7, the only way we’ll get that done is to bond it. We’ve been talking about expansion of the Fisher Meadows ball field; that’s what is in the projected debt. It will all have to be approved, each one as we go along.
How are we doing – it’s always nice to say how do we look compared to our neighbors? This effective tax rate, put together by the policy boards of the State will give us some idea where we stand. The mill rate isn’t a good measure, what’s included, how reval affects it – the effective tax rate. Burlington 164 vs. our 158, Canton 178, Farmington is 151 but the way they’ve been going up the last couple of years, they could be equal to us. Glastonbury 177, Granby 211, Simsbury 26 and West Hartford. One of the major reasons our taxes are this way is we have a large contribution from the business community. Over 20% of our taxes come from the business community. Another area of the Town and School keeping their costs down, when you look at the cost
per pupil compared to other Towns around here, we are very low. If somebody says I can’t afford to live here anymore – I always say I don’t know where you’re going to build where you can do much better. We’re trying to keep costs down but we also know there’s a whole problem for the seniors and so these past two years we have been looking at some sort of circuit breaker program. We have a chart showing what the State allows and what Avon has done to try to keep costs down. Recently, the Town decided to increase that even more. People from 0 to $13,400 would get $1,900 in tax relief – that could be almost all of their taxes. We also increased the category from 38,000 to 43,000, this will help our seniors stay in Town. When we started this program there were only 16 participants in the Town, last year it went to 159 families. The total cost to the taxpayers is about $100,000. If we
have 7000 taxpayers, that $100,000 is not too bad. We think this is a good program. We also have a problem for renters, that’s a State program. There is a difference between single and married and their benefit is based on income. The absolute minimum is between $500 and $900. Tied to this is the fact that this program is administrated by the Social Services Department. Anyone who has any questions about any of these programs, all you have to do is call Social Services. Everything is on a very private basis – you meet privately with them, they set up appointments to tell you what you need. The time to apply for the home owners program is March 15th to May 15 and for renters it’s May 15th to September 15th.
In summary, the final slide shows where we stand. We’ll accept questions later.
Mr. Harrison: Thank you very much, Dick, for a very thorough and comprehensive presentation. Please save your questions, we’ll be getting to them in a little while. Next up, the Board of Education, Chairwoman, Peggy Roell.
Mrs. Roell: Thank you, Tom. Before I start, I’d like to take a minute to introduce the Board of Ed members that are here – Doug Evans, Dave Shopis, Mike Eagan, Bernadette Mayer, Tom McNeill, Sue Henneberry and Ken Notestein. Also, Dr. Kisiel, our Superintendent, and Gary Franzi, our Business Manager. As a follow up to the focus group we had last week, I’d like to start off the presentation by just showing you a little overview of what’s going on in our schools. Then we’ll discuss what’s in our budget and again, hopefully, you’ll have a better understanding of how your tax dollars are being invested in our schools. You also want to check out our most recent Newsletter that hopefully you all received in the mail and is also copied on
our website and copies in the library which was another recommendation from the focus group last week. You may recall about a year and a half ago, the Board of Ed did a community survey through the focus groups and as a follow up to that made a new mission statement and goal. Hopefully by working together to achieve these we’ll continue to maintain the excellent school system that many of you helped build, others of you have moved here for, and that we’re all known for. We are in a position where we want to maintain these high quality schools while at the same time being responsive to the taxpayers, some Board members are taxpayers also. Let’s take a few minutes to look at some of the highlights of this past year. Hopefully you’ve read about a lot of these in our local newspapers. As you can see, not all of our achievements are academic and also I’m very proud of all our students. As part of our goal
we’ve tried to get more continuing interaction between the schools and the community, and some of those partnership ideas are here. One of them is the “back to school” cards where all citizens can get them either here at the Senior Center or at the Library where it lists where they can get into all all school events for free. That’s been well received. I’d also like to take just a second to thank our non-parent volunteers in the school, a retired citizen Mr. Mack who does tutoring for us; Mrs. Stahl who came in and spent the day with us at Thompson Brook School for part of a day; Mr. Mortimer who spent hours and hours working on a new projection model trying to project our enrollment. Also, the V.F.W. post who had 30 gentlemen who spent Veteran’s Day in our schools and then invited our Santa Band to come and perform at their Christmas Holiday Party. And, last, but not least, the Volunteer Fire Department who,
after the High School Boys won the State Championship, gave them a Fire Department Escort with sirens blaring back into Town. It was very much appreciated.
As we were putting together the budget from the Principals up to the Superintendent to
the Board of Ed, budget sub-committee through the whole Board level, we had eight
goals we were trying to achieve. Through the whole budget process, everyone was very
aware of the need to be fiscally responsible while still maintaining our quality. I’ll take a
few minutes to review these and we’ll discuss how each of them affects the budget and
go through the presentation. We needed to honor all the collective bargaining agreements
with our six bargaining groups; we needed to meet all the Federal and State mandates,
including Special Education legislation, legislation in No Child Left Behind, it also
includes Phase 2 of a comprehensive student data management system required under
NCLD and revise supports to additional curriculum initiatives. We also wanted to
provide some new text books, library books, and equipment purchases reduced from prior
budgets, try to support some additional personnel requests and try to stabilize Special
Education expenditures and through all this we needed to accommodate the 2% projected
increase in school enrollment. We had many tough decisions. This proposed budget
does not include an additional guidance counselor at the high school, a grade 6 teacher,
an additional teacher at Roaring Brook, a world language teacher at the middle school
and for grade 5. All of these positions were justified by the principals but due to fiscal
restraints are not included in our proposed budget, nor were they included in Dr. Kisiel’s
proposed budget for the Board sub-committee. The budget sub-committee did make
some cuts in order to ad a High School English teacher. Let’s take a minute to look at the
enrollment projections of the State Department of Education. As of last October we
3,303 students and they are projecting us to have 3,358 students by next October. As of
March 1st we already have 3,324 students. Just for comparative purposes, I went back to
see what our enrollment was 10 years ago, in October 1994 it was 2,207, or an increase of
about 50%. As you can see on this chart, the State projection shows minimal growth in
Kindergarten through 8th grade and also significant growth at the High School. Also as
shown here, our building capacities, Mr. Hines talked about building projects, Thompson
Brook School, we feel that for K-8th, our building capacities will be sufficient in the near
term. At the High School we are currently at 903 students, so we just went over the
official capacity. As I mentioned, Mr. Mortimer did some projections for us that actually
show a greater growth at the High School. His projections are projected we’re going to
have about 1,200 kids in 2010. Let’s take a few minutes to look at average class sizes.
As you saw on the chart a little while ago, one of the forums we had about a month ago, was a forum on class size. There were very good speakers and some hand outs, if you would like the hand outs, let me know and we’ll get you copies. What I also did was to go back to see what class sizes were 10 years ago. I went to the strategic school size for 1995. At the high school our ratio was 16/1, actually up from 15/1 in 1992; for 7th grade 10 showed…… The Board of Finance is not saying we should go back to class sizes we had 10 years ago, although I think a lot of parents would like that. What we’re trying to do is just to show the importance of maintaining the current class sizes that we have. That was one of the purposes of the class size forum.
Next, let’s talk about what’s in our proposed budget for this year. As you can see on the chart, salaries and benefits for regular education account for about 24.3 million, or 68% of our budget. Special Ed accounts for 4.5 million, or about 13% of our budget so between those two items we’ve got about 81% of our budget. We’ll discuss each of those in more detail. The other three categories add up to about 6.5 million, or 19% of our budget. We’ll show some of the cost saving initiatives that we have that allowed us to keep increases to these accounts at a very minimum level. We’ll begin with personnel costs including Special Education which account for 27.5 million, or 78% of our budget. We’re proposing to add 3.5 positions for a total cost
of about $155,000. Those positions include 2 classroom teachers, English teacher at the high school I referred to earlier, advisor/teacher at Roaring Brook, a half time Special Ed teacher at Thompson Brook and a .4 time English as a second language teacher for the district. I was very surprised to learn that this year we had 20 students come to Pine Grove that knew very little English and required additional classes learning how to speak English. Of the 27.5 million, it includes $836,000 for salary increases for existing personnel and about $510,000 additional cost for benefits, again for existing personnel. Again, as most of you are aware, during the past year, this past fall, we negotiated two different contracts; the teacher’s contract and the secretary’s contract. We feel both contracts were settled were in balance for both the employees and the Town. The actual range of increase is 2.7% for teachers who’ve been with us 12
years or more, about 62% of our teachers, to 17% for the 15 teachers who received an additional degree this year and in teacher jargon, changed lanes on the salary schedule. The overall increase of teachers salaries is about 3.7% which those of you who’ve been here in past years is much lower than we’ve seen in the last couple of years. We’re very happy about that. Also as part of the teacher’s contract, we were able to incur cost savings, we have transferred to the teachers what the Town does not have to incur of $110,000 of costs related to benefit plans, through increased employee contributions and higher employee co-payments.
Going to the next section of the pie chart, Special Education, which represents 4.5 million or about 13% of our budget, we currently have 306 children in our school system receiving special education services, or about 9.4% of the students. That compares to about 11% of the kids on a state-wide basis, so we’re actually lower than average. Many of these services are supposed to be paid for by the State and Federal governments; actually Avon and all Towns are supposed to be incurred for all costs for any child at 5 times our normal per pupil cost, which in our case is a little over $50,000. Because of State budget woes, we only get about 65% of that. To try to minimize our costs over the last 8 or 10 years, instituted an in-district program so we can avoid having transportation and tuition
costs for these children. Last fall, we had a forum on special education who put together a question and answer sheet (that’s also available on the website and at the library) for anybody who might be interested. The other three categories of the pie represents 6.5 million, for 19%, these are some of our cost saving measures we’ve been implementing over the past couple of years. In addition, we’re in multiple purchasing groups for the Town and with other schools districts and we’re continuously looking for additional ways to save monies. Here’s our budget summary. If you compare our current operating budget to the numbers on the Board of Finance chart, you’ll notice there is about a $16,000 difference. That’s because the Board of Ed got an additional $16,000 allocation this year to cover last year’s expenditures, so we’ll be reducing our current budget by that amount so we can still meet the
Board of Finance’s 5.5%. Luckily or unluckily, one of our Assistant Principals is retiring and because a replacement will only be on a school-year basis we’ll have a savings of about $17,000 that will cover that expense. As mentioned earlier, some hard decisions were made by principals, by Dr. Kisiel, by the budget sub-committee and the Board of Ed to be able to come to a 5.5% number that the Board of Finance requested.
I’ll just take a minute to take a look at what’s in this number. $136,000 for salary increases for existing 383 employees – this represents about 2.4% of our total budget. $510,000 of increase cost of benefits for existing personnel representing about 1.4% of our total budget; the remaining $496,000 increase or 1.4% total budget represents other items. When you exclude the new personnel that we already talked about, it represents about 1% of our total budget. The other items – library books for the K-8 schools, the Town has actually spent 0 on library books for the elementary schools in the last 3 years.
Instructional equipment includes science equipment, music equipment, some computers. The new addition that we talked about was a new reading program for K-2, our current program is about 10 years old and we are no longer able to get the materials that are required to teach that program. The new math program, you will recall we implemented it in 1st and 2nd grade, last year we added 3rd grade and next year as the 3rd graders become 4th graders, we’d like to implement this. We already talked about 2.9 new teaching personnel, the half maintenance worker is a person who will be hired in January; we did not get any new maintenance people after Thompson Brook was opened. Thompson Brook is now 3 years old and it’s time to start doing some
preventive maintenance so we can protect our asset and hopefully to save costs in the long run. The Student data management system is required by No Child Left Behind. Our school district is required to report to the State in a certain way and the State has to report to the Federal Government, results on each individual student. Custodial equipment is several large pieces of equipment, mostly floor washers for preventive maintenance in order to preserve our Town assets. In summary, as a Board we’d really love to come in with a zero percent increase, but with the growth we’ve been in, we didn’t feel we could do that and maintain our programs. Actually since 2002, we have been making actual cuts in our programs. We’re down 2 administrators, even with the opening of Thompson Brook School, 3 of our vice-principals have retired since that time and are now school year contracts instead of year long contracts, saving about
$17,000 each. At the high school, we had a graduation requirement of 2 credits of gym, which meant kids were getting 4 of their 8 semesters, now because of costs and space facilities, we had to change the requirement to one credit. That means in the four years of eight semesters the kids are at the high school, they have gym 2 semesters, only. We’ve eliminated the Home Ec program, additional electives like a theater class, library aides, computer arts program at the middle school, enrichment teachers for both the elementary schools, the Avon Parents as Teachers program. In summary, our overall spending increase is 5.5% meeting the Board of Finance guidelines; we have cost control savings in place and are always looking for additional items; we’ve saved a lot of special education costs; we’ve shown a reduction in the rate of salary increases with the new teacher’s contract, support new and deferred curriculum initiatives and have funds
for additional personnel to meet our growth. On a per student basis, our increase is about 3.5% as compared to the increase in the CPI of 3.3%. Thank you very much.
Mr. Harrison: Thank you, Peggy. We’re going to have a brief presentation now from the Board of Finance. I have to tell you Steve McGuff, our former member has done this in the past. Of course, he has left our Board so you’re stuck with me now doing this and I’m sure I won’t do it as well as Steve. Secondly, the full set of slides is in the hand out that you received. I’m not going to address all of the slides that you’ll see; some of them duplicate what you have already seen. What I’d like to do to shorten this a little so we can get to questions, is mainly talk about the broader picture and the philosophy of where we think the Town is and how it’s gotten there, rather than just go through another set of slides
showing so many dollars for this and so many dollars for that. Before we get to the slides, I want to give you just a bit of background. Most of you probably ask why in hell do we need a Board of Finance. Well, we asked that question. Our spouses knew all the time, particularly. The General Statutes of Connecticut allow Towns to establish a Board of Finance and Avon has taken advantage of that authority. The theory behind a Board of Finance is to provide a set of checks and balances to the spending needs of the Board of Education and the Town Council. We’re there as a sort of balance between your wallets and the spending requirements of the other two boards. We do that because under State law, where Towns have a Board of Finance, it’s only the Board of Finance that actually has the legal authority to set a tax rate. The Board of Education and the Town Council cannot do that. They can make policy, they can set
the overall programs, but they cannot raise the money to pay for it. Our Board is that check and balance system, we’re the only ones who have the authority to raise the funds, but we cannot set policies and procedures. The Legislature and the voters have thought that trade-off between the policy makers and the tax raisers would provide a basis for the Town to get some checks and balances on the spending. So that’s why we have a Board of Finance allowed by State law and the voters, each time there’s been a Charter revision have approved having a Board of Finance. That’s why we’re here and that’s what we do.
This year we’ve all been through the last three years what I’ll call agiTown over our budgets. We’ve had four of seven budgets that have been defeated over the past three years. What did the Board of Finance think it would be appropriate to do after that. None of really enjoys this, you don’t, we don’t and the other Boards don’t either. So, if Peggy will go now to slide No. 5, in the handout what we did after the second and third budget referenda last year we took a look back at the mill rate history of the Town. It’s very interesting, the chart shows roughly going back 10 years, you’ll notice throughout the mid to late 90’s the average tax increase that you the voters approved was a little over or a little under 3%. Although
it’s not on the chart, the numbers in the early 90’s were pretty much in that range, around 3%. 1999 to 2000 was the year we started the Referendum system, we switched from the Town Meeting. You’ll notice the first Referendum year was also the lowest tax increase – 1.91%. What happened then in 2000 when there is a huge jump, a tax increase to 9.28%? The reason for that had to do with, that was a revaluation year and that year we had the Grand List actually decrease. So, just to stay even, before you considered any spending levels, we needed a tax increase just a shade under 6%, so when you take that 6% to get to where we were before, then added on another 3%, that’s how you got to the 9.28%. But remember that was not a gross net increase. In 2001/02 interestingly enough, we had a fairly high by historical standards tax increase of 5.7% and that was the only year since we’ve had a
referendum that we did not draw the 9% minimum turnout required for the referendum to be counted. I can’t explain that – the second highest tax increase in our history didn’t even draw the 9% turnout. Then you get into 02/03 and that’s when the “fun” started – that’s when we started having budgets defeated. In 02/03 we had a second referendum that wound up with a tax increase of 5.41%. We told you after that first defeated referendum that we were going to work over the succeeding years to try to get the tax increase down to a level that worked very well during the 90’s when we were also a growing Town, but were able to get by with about a 3% increase every year. So we had 5.41% in 02. The next year again we had the budget defeated the first time around. And we wound up after the second referendum with a 3.66% increase. Last year was extremely complicated because it was a reval year
as well. We had two referenda defeated. And we wound up last year with a 2.87% tax increase, finally into that historical range. It probably got us there a year or two sooner than we would have if it had gone the way we thought it might, but it didn’t. You see, the tax trend, except for the blip late 90 and early 2000, there’s been a range around 3% or so. The proposal this year, if nothing changes, you will need a tax increase of 4.13%. You have to remember, the Town’s revenues come approximately 88 or 89% from property taxes. We only draw about 11% from so called “other” revenues, they could be State reimbursements, Federal reimbursements, interest income if we have any, fees – people come into the Town and need permits, etc. but we need about 88% of our revenues come from the property tax. So that’s the pattern.
Slide No. 8 traces the Referendum history, the percentages and the final votes, the numbers, etc. If you look at the voting patterns particularly the past three years, you can see the numbers and percentage of turnout kept going up and we think that was drive in large part because of the size of the tax increases. We looked at the mill rate history, we looked at the voting history and what we decided to do when we set our spending targets this year is try to determine what did those two patterns tell us. Obviously different people will draw different conclusions. What we looked at was we need to do something to get a little bit better handle on the spending growth which in turn triggers the need for higher tax increases. We considered a couple of different things; one of the obvious
points of reference would be the changes in the consumer price index. We did look at that very seriously, should that be the standard we should use. We wound up rejecting that for a couple of reasons; first of all, that is a nationally derived figure, it doesn’t really address what might be our needs here in Avon. We may have particularly strong growth in the school system for example, and locking it in to a nationally based figure wouldn’t really work. Secondly, there have been times, some of you who are old enough to remember the late 70’s and early 80’s, we had CPI changes of 12% and 14% some years. We really had no confidence that the voters here would approve tax increases in that range at all. So we rejected the CPI as a measure; we looked at some other things; what we finally came up when all else failed, was look to see what the voters have told us. What we did then was look at the amounts of spending
that you actually approved over the last couple of years.
Slide No. 9 shows that we focused on the last three years because those were the ones that were most controversial, particularly with the budget referendum being defeated. On a Town Council operating budget side, you can see the increase was ranged from 7.6% to 4.5% to last year 2.7%. Well what we did was average those three dollar amounts that you approved, that came out to a shade under 5%. Since that was a declining trend, we decided to lower that to 4.5% and we asked the Town Council to limit it’s operating budget increase this year to no more than 4.5%. That’s how we got to that number. It boils down to what you voters have been willing to approve over the last 3 years.
Slide No. 10 – Again, if you see the actual number of increase that you’ve approved, you find 7.7%, 5.5%, 4.7%. That averaged out to 6%, again a declining figure so we set the target this year at 5.5%. I’m very pleased, as both Boards have already mentioned, they did submit operating budgets within the targets we suggested for them. It wasn’t done with a ouiji board or an abacus, it was just done by looking at the numbers that you have been willing to approve and we thought that would be probably as good a target as any. That got us to where we are. Both Boards did meet those targets. As you know, those targets related only to the operating budgets. There are other components in the Town’s budget, one item is Debt Service. That’s not
something we’ll decide how much we will pay, you can’t tell your lending banker on your auto loan that you’re going to pay a little less this year, you have to pay what you have to pay. We could not set a spending target on Debt Service. We didn’t get into the Sewer Budget because that’s funded by separate charges, and in terms of the Capital Improvement Program, or the CIP, we decided not to set a target for that because that’s something that crossed both boards. Although it’s really part of the Council’s budget, it does work for the Board of Education. They frequently have items in there, such as roof improvements, etc. All of the combined budget items come in and if adopted without change we have to increase the taxes by 4.13% which is higher than the historical range of around 3%. What we’d like to do tonight, obviously we’ll listen to what you have to say, it would be very
helpful to all three boards when you’re making your comments, not just to give us general statements; no increases, decreases, leave it alone. Let us know to the extent you’re comfortable with what you think we might be able to do and how comfortable you are paying that much of a tax increase. In the past, while everybody has the right to speak, and that will be respected tonight, without question, just standing up and saying you want us to spend more, you want us to spend less, thank you and sitting down – it doesn’t really give us any helpful or useful information.
Slide No 13. is where we are tonight. There are the requested increases, etc. The next steps in the process tonight is the Public Hearing required by the Charter; we will have a couple of workshops scheduled, one for this Wednesday, another one next Monday if necessary and another one next Wednesday, if necessary. It’s possible we can wrap it up on Wednesday or we may have to go over. I suggest you check the Town website and we’ll let you know if we need to come back next Monday or Wednesday. At one of those workshops in the next two week stretch, the Board of Finance will vote to set the budget that it recommends to you. It may be what’s on the table tonight, it may be lower, but it will be the recommended budget and then we’ll present that recommended budget at
the Town Meeting on May 2nd. As you know, there’s no vote taken at that meeting under the referendum system, but you’ll be able to find out what’s in the recommended to the extent it may differ from what you see on the table tonight. You can ask questions about the recommended budget but then we’ll adjourn to the Referendum on May 11th, 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. here at the Senior Citizens. Now I’ll ask the Board of Finance members to come back up here and we’ll get into the question and answer session. As I mentioned earlier, the way we’re going to work this is the first round of questions will focus on the Town Council’s portion of the budget and Dick Hines will field those questions. Then we’ll take questions on the Board of Education’s part of the budget and then we’ll stay as late as we need to stay to take any questions on any part of the budget. Again, we have a
microphone here at the front with a podium for someone who may have notes or pages they would like to use; and there’s also a microphone behind Peg Colligan in the center isle. Please tell us your name and where you live. We’ll do it by the raising of hands and I’ll try to see everybody. Who would like to be the first?
Dotty Magda, 12 Crestwood Drive here in Avon. Again, I’ve been to several of these the last couple of years but I have a question that may be a little out of the field. But I’m confused. You’re saying here on Page 22 that projected debt is 19 million for the High School, 1 million for roads, and so forth. When you decide on the budget and vote on the budget, this money which is a great deal of money, is going to be required to take care of these things. You’re talking about bonding; bonding is still a process of getting us to pay for these debts. How does the bonding process and covering these amounts of millions of dollars come out of our pockets and how do they affect our taxes as they are coming up?
Mr. Harrison: I’ll let Dick respond to that. Just to give a little introduction to that, bonding is done separately – you’re absolutely correct on that. It’s done by a completely separate referendum process, it’s not on the ballot now. We’re just talking about the Town’s portion of the budget. I think what Dick Hines was doing was just referencing some items that may be coming down the pike, depending, obviously whether the voters approve or disapprove. Tonight, and in this budget process, no one is being asked to address what might be needed for the High School expansion, etc. They’re just there because they may be issues facing the Town in the future.
Mr. Hines: All of the costs for bonding comes into our debt and is paid off each year in taxes. We showed you this year our debt is and it’s not going up, it’s about the same level as last year. That will probably be the same next year. Sometime this year, we’ll have a referendum on the high school project. It will be to bond a certain amount of money to take care of that project. It’ll probably include paying for the Rhodes property, too. I don’t think at this time we would include the Library or the Fisher Meadows area. We may do the Town improvements so it may be the high school, the Town purchase of land and the 1.5 million for Rhodes. That hasn’t been decided yet. If the voters approve that, then we will go out to
bonding and then we would have a schedule we would have to pay for that, so the chart I showed you are projected with the kind of payments that we project over the years. The first part will be the high school, the Rhodes property and possible the Town Hall improvements. Then down the road, maybe five years from now there will be another referendum on the Library expansion and if that goes in, that would affect the bonding, too. We do these on a series basis, definitely you have to pay for it out of the operating budget. One of things I brought up earlier is since we’ve had so many school project, we’ve been cutting back on the Capital Improvement Program so that we can pay for the debt and not have large tax increases. (Mrs. Magda: So that does become part of the tax.) Absolutely and we try to do it on the most efficient basis. We minimize our debts, we try to pay all of our Capital programs on a cash basis – that’s one of the reasons we have a AAA credit rating. We have
$435,000 in here for road resurfacing. When we look at the Town of Farmington, they bond that, that’s one of the reasons they don’t have a AAA credit rating. We try to do things on the most efficient basis to have the lowest possible rate to the taxpayer.
Mr. Harrison: That’s the Debt Service Portion, $4.9 million or so that’s in there. That’s like our monthly mortgage payments. The debts get paid off, but if we had that debt in the annual portion, the debt service would go up. Other questions?
Bob Paine, 68 Tamara Circle: I want to thank the internet for being here because the internet is a great research tool to find out what people are doing in this country with these problems. In thinking outside the box there are such things that are going on that would surprise us. First of all, people are effectively trying to grow their commercial base faster than they are growing their residential base of taxpayers. Very effective.
Farmington used to do that, Farmington had a … of commercial taxable property of any Town within a 50 mile radius of Avon, and now they’re catching up because they have sort of run out of commercial property development. Now it’s beginning to fall on the residential base. The other item I think is very interesting is that (Mr. Harrison – Bob, is there a question coming?) Well, I’m asking all of us to think a little bit outside the box and do our homework. One of the pieces of homework is that we’ve got to think seriously about other than being a bedroom community, strictly a bedroom community. We have a great opportunity to have a great desirable location and other Towns around the country are actually selling and leasing back their own property. It puts property back on the tax rolls, it gets out of providing maintenance, services with unionized employees. There are tremendous advantages – they are even building schools by private contractors and then leasing those
buildings. This is going on all over the country. If we don’t begin to think on that basis, then we’re going to do exactly what we continue to do and that’s have the homeowner taxpayers suffer the consequences. Frankly, people, the demands of the public school system in a competitive environment that we’re in nationally and internationally this is never going to cease. We are going to need more and better schools, we’re going to need facilities unless we want to fall behind, not only as a Town but also as a country. That’s all I have to say.
Mr. Harrison: Thank you Bob. Other questions on the Town’s portion of the budget? OK, now we’ll entertain questions on the Board of Education’s budget.
Christina Scatchell, 15 Thornwood Lane: My question is, there is talk about cuts for the English teacher and I was wondering where those other cuts are to be coming from. If there’s going to be classes for electives and what’s being cut from the High School budget.
Peg Roell: Actually the cuts are not larger class sizes; we were able to use monies from when lose their text books or library books the parents pay for them. We have those funds to offset purchasing new books. Also, gate receipts from sports events are going to be used for purchasing equipment for the sports teams that originally in the budget. (What about the High School English teacher?) Ms. Roell, that’s where we got the money for the English teacher. The Board of Ed’s budget sub-committee decided they wanted to add the new English teacher, so they had to find $40,000 from other items in the budget.
Mr. Harrison: Anyone else? OK, any questions about anything at all related to the budgets?
Florence Stahl, 2 Sunset Trail: Good evening everyone. It’s great to see so many people attend the budget hearings. Even the Board of Finance has reduced the percent of spending, 80% of the budget is already committed when we walk into this room. They have to maneuver with all the demands of their constituents with only 20% of the budget. That being said, 20% of $59.1 million is still a lot of money and we must pay attention to how it is spent. Increasing property taxes year after year beyond the rate of inflation is a punishing formula for many residents. Unhappily, for the first time in their lives, many home owners have had to register with Town Hall for property tax relief. They simply can’t keep up with taxes driven primarily by expenditures for the
education sector. In the past we always found a way to achieve common goals. What’s gone wrong? We could have a whole seminar on what’s gone wrong, but in a nut shell, what’s gone wrong is that spending is exceeding revenues and the inflation rate, even in this wind fall year. As you already know, we must return to increases that more closely follow the consumer price index. This year, that would be about 2.5%. Thank you.
Mr. Harrison: Thank you Flo. Any other questions?
Peter Forte, 20 Chestnut Drive: I have a question on the step program, can somebody explain to me how that works?
Ms. Roell: Sure. When teachers are first hired, this is not just in Avon, this goes on all over the country, it’s the way the contracts have been for the last 30 years. They come in at step #1. Actually when you look in their contracts, there are different levels – in our case 12 different levels. For each year they are employed the move up one step. When they get to step #12, that’s the maximum and at that point they only get general wage increase. They no longer get compensation for additional of experience. Mr. Forte: What I want to know is how much a teacher with five years experience and a Bachelors Degree – I was told they would get a general increase by 5% - is that correct? Ms. Roell: They will be making
$48, 879. I’m not sure my numbers are right, so let me get back to you to confirm that. If you’ll come and see me afterwards I’ll get your phone number. Mr. Forte: I have an article from Canton that says their step program is 2.4, what is ours, 5%, is that for every year? Does that go up or down? Ms. Roell: It gets negotiated, every time we negotiate a contract there will be increases in each of the step levels as part of the overall contract. This varies by the step levels. I’d be happy to give you a whole chart that shows the individual. Even though we have a 3 year contract, we have teachers that are with us for 35 years. The whole teacher’s contract is public knowledge. It’s also on the website.
Mr. Harrison: Be sure to see Peggy before you leave so she’ll get the address or a phone number. Dr. Kisiel, is there a rough average for what the step increases are, a percentage?
Dr. Kisiel: The average is 3.9% for the teachers, but that’s an average. That’s the general wage increase plus the step increases. It varies from one step to another, and it varies more considerably for a teacher who moves from a Masters Degree, to a Masters plus 30 hours degree. They get increased beyond the general increase if they move into a different salary range. In Avon, there are 3 salary ranges: Bachelor’s, Master’s or a degree above the Master’s degree.
Mr. Harrison: Thank you, Dr. Kisiel. Other questions?
Nancy Muench, 34 Sudbury Lane: I don’t like living in a community where bickering between the very segments of our population gets louder and louder every year. We all bear the responsibility to support segments of our community other than our own. I’m here to say that supporting our schools is important to our entire community, young, old, families with children and families without children. People move to this Town because of the schools, no doubt. But I’m very tired of hearing the “What’s in it for me?” mentality with the school budget. Too often I hear “I don’t have any kids in school, why should I pay higher taxes because of the schools?” Well, good schools mean good students which means safe communities and
steady property values. I’m an accountant; I like numbers, so let me give you my own personal example. I’ve lived here over 10 years, I have three children in the Avon school system. It costs approximately $9,000 per year to educate my children. If you do the math over the past 10 years, the Town has spent approximately $270,000 educating my children. This is just the education piece. Over these 10 years I’ve also had my roads maintained, a lovely library, police protection, wonderful parks and rec opportunities, etc. etc. Over the same period of time my taxes have been approximately $6,000 to $7,000 per year. As you can see, I’m getting a really good deal. Some of you are bearing the burden for educating my children and I thank you. In a few years, I will no longer have children in the public schools. For those of you who have to have quid pro quo or tit for tat, it will take me a long time
to repay this Town for the benefits I received. If I’ve done my calculations correctly, I need to keep paying taxes for the next 30 years to repay my debt to the Town, just for the education. I’ve gotten a good deal and so have many other people in this Town, who are older now and their children are not in school. Someone else was bearing the burden for your children, right, when they were in school. In fact most families 30 years or so ago were larger and so the debt you incurred was probably proportionately larger. So now I feel like, well I already got mine, now you can’t have yours. Let me give you another example of inequity. Social Security. I’m sure most people who are now collecting Social Security are receiving much more in benefits that they ever paid in. You have the younger population to thank for that. My own children, who you are now educating are going to be paying into a program for which
the benefits will never be as generous as they are to the current Social Security generation. I’m not complaining about this! I’m just trying to a point that there are certain segments of the population that are taking more than they put in. We may be taking more in the education part, and maybe you’re taking more in the Social Security part. It’s just not fair, life just isn’t fair. You just need to get used to that. The largest portion of the school budget is payroll related. The teachers’ contracts were recently renegotiated with concessions given by both sides. There is very little wiggle room in the rest of the budget. Over the 10 years I’ve lived here, more and more programs have been cut from the school and Town budgets. A number of factors do come into play – the economy has worsened, we needed to tighten our belts and we did. The government implemented more
requirements for our schools for which we had to comply because they weren’t fully funded. We complied. More children are being helped by special education programs. These cost money. I’m very lucky that I never had to use this service, but I don’t resent bearing the burden of these costs. Life and education has changed a lot since I went to school. That’s a factor we have to accept. Change happens. I’m very tired of hearing about overpaid teachers. My husband is a teacher at the Avon Middle School. His net pay does not cover one year of my son’s college tuition. He is not overpaid. On a positive note, my son feels his education, the one who is in college now, in the Avon public schools has prepared him very well to be successful in college and beyond. And I thank you. I want to state emphatically that I do not to alienate our senior population. I have an
elderly mother dealing with financial issues just like many of our ….. Mr. Harrison: Perhaps you could start to …..
I am wrapping this up, it’s scary sometime to think about what will happen when my mother gets sick, but saving $200 a year on her real estate taxes isn’t going to make any difference if that happens. I empathize with those who have limited fixed incomes. Prescription drugs cost a lot of money, utilities, food. I realize you can’t live off the increase in your property values. And I appreciate the accountability that the Avon Taxpayers Association has brought to the discussions. At times, it begins to be unreasonable. It’s not only about you and your concerns, it’s really about all of us. Our children should have a quality education, quality education costs money. The last few years have not cut out fat, they’ve cut away bone.
I urge the Town finance committee to accept the school budget and Town budget as presented this evening. Thank you.
Claire Henderson, 1 Keystone Circle: I’ve lived here 26 years. This is not what I was going to say, but the Town’s gotten a good deal with me. I’ve been paying for my own maintenance in a private neighborhood, I pay approximately $1,200 a year for that, plus my own taxes to the Town. I never had a kid in school here. Be thankful that you have people like me living in Town. But I look at the Grand List that is up over 3% and spending that is overall closer to 6% between the combined budgets, debt service and sewers. It makes no economic sense to have spending increased that much over the Grand List. That’s sort of like spending into your principal. We are invading principal and we should not be doing that. Last year, the majority of
growth numbers faced a double digit increase due to revaluation, for sure, but that was the majority of taxpayers. A 4% tax increase, when added to that just does not sit well. We must stop biting the hands, in our hands, that feed our Town. It is invading principal. Our tax increase must not exceed 2.5%. Thank you, Claire.
Linda Merwin: 48 High Gate Drive: I have some comments directly to the Board of Finance. You all have heard me talk many times, and you know where I stand so I will try to keep this brief. Whether you are on the yes side or the no side of this annual issue there is one thing that we all have in common. We are all part of the same community and we all love living in the Town of Avon. This is evidenced by the survey done last year which, in spite of the friction that heats up around these budgets, showed a very high satisfaction level of residents in this Town. What does this mean? I think it means that we all love living in this wonderful Town, but we don’t all agree on what the Town has become or what it should be. Face it! Avon has had enormous
growth and has changed over the years. But it’s focus has not necessarily changed along with it. Many want to keep things the way they were and ignore the growth as well as the needs created by that growth. Some have even used the language that we should “starve the beast”. We all know that if we ignore the growth and the needs, if we really do starve the beast, Avon will not be able to maintain itself the way it always has. It will not be the Town we all love and want to continue to love and it will not thrive. Already services have suffered. The library hours have been decreased, there is no more brush pick up, we’ve heard of the Police Department’s needs and yes, the school classrooms are over crowded and there are no frills. You’ve heard the Town way tonight it’s falling behind on Capital Improvements. In fact, when you look at the Town and the board of ed, we need a lot of
things and we are falling woefully behind under the recent budgets. In addition, we need to expand both our high school and our library to accommodate the growth. While I know that’s another issue for another referendum, it is very important and we should not forget it. There is no question that we as a community must learn to come together and support this Town we all came to love before it is too late. You are our elected leaders, almost all of you have served while Avon has grown. You all know that Avon is not a frivolous or wasteful Town. You all know we have one of the best tax rates in the area by shown tonight by Dick Hines’ presentation. You all know the Town needs funds to run efficiently and properly, you all know that these extremely tight budgets year after year are slowly chipping away at the services provided and the very kind of Town we are. There is no waste here and the presentations tonight clearly show
that the overwhelming needs of the Town are not being met. You set a cap for both the Board of Ed and the Town Council, you purportedly based that cap on a combination of valid needs, and a recognition of the lack of a willingness to pay that’s been demonstrated over the past few years. Meeting this cap was not easy and many would say that the Town could use more, but the caps were met. Do not cave in on your views of what the needs of this Town really are simply because you feel that those might once again be outweighed by a lack of a willingness to pay for them. If you, as elected leaders, believe the Town of Avon will be better if this budget remains as it is, if you as elected leaders believe there is a legitimate need to run this Town with the funds being requested, then do not cut the proposed budget prematurely. Give the entire Town a chance to support the real needs of this community before you make any additional cuts. Thank
you.
Kirk Varner, 65 Harris Road: I am sorry that some of those local critics of the budget process have chosen to leave early in the evening. It doesn’t take much time to criticize and leave. I guess the question I have is would it be possible for both the Town and the Board of Ed to do one calculation. I think what might be helpful here, in averaging over the past two years, the cost of both Federal and State Mandates that both of those budgets are trying to take into consideration, and also if possible, an averaging of the loss of funds from either of those bodies back to the Town, which is an important part of this calculation process in terms of trying to give us all some indication of what we’re dealing with in terms of a moving target on monies that are not coming back to
the Town or to the Board of Ed, but yet are required expenditures to both those organizations. That’s something we need.
Mr. Hines: Governor Rell, in her budget, has included a study, a recommendation, that the legislature appoint a committee to study all the unfunded mandates from the State. I testified on legislation in favor of that bill; I also urged the legislature to look at the Federal items, too, especially in special education. You just can’t look at what State taxes the Town has pay. I’m hoping that study will again prove, it doesn’t cost any money to do it, maybe a couple of million dollars and they would appoint a number of people, maybe about 12 members to a committee to do it. We can do it on our own, too, but I think it’s better to wait. (Mr. Varner) I don’t disagree with that, but I think actual numbers the good people in Avon in near
actual tax dollars and how they’ve been impacted. I think of the Board of Education and “No Child Left Behind” and Federal mandates are hard to calculate, but it certainly seems to make sense to be able to talk about the decline in funds, if there is one, coming back from those agencies. Mr. Hines: All the unfunded mandates that we have to take care of – the expansion of the Town Clerk’s office – is something we would not do. The Town Clerk would under those difficult situations and probably the expansion would be later, but that’s an example. The Police Department, I indicated we have a lot more requirements for the police and their files.
Valerie Ferro, 88 Daventry Hill: I’d like to shift the focus back to something broader. First let me share with you some statistics: enrollment has increased in Avon Public Schools from 1993 to 2000, by 25.8%; the amount of developable land has increased considerably, as well. In 1985, it was 17.8%, 1990 it climbed to 19.9%, 1995 it climbed to 24.4% and in 2002 it climbed 22.2% and I really couldn’t get the latest figures, but as I understand it, it continues to grow. Overall, from 1985 to 2002, that represents also 26% increase in developed land. Despite Avon being a very small Town, it ranks 23 out of 169 municipalities in the increase in percentage of developable land in that period of time. With this rate of growth, I do not see how anyone can deny the
fact that with growth, our budgets grow. We have increased demands for not only educational services but public services and as Nancy previously mentioned, very nicely, I think, that we all have to take our turn. What I really want to do, and you know that I represent a faction we have over 1200 people on our phone tree, as part of the Avon Citizens for Education group. We are tired of the whining, we are tired of drawing lines in the sand. What we have to do is to get together and redirect our focus and stop whining at the end of the pike. No more whining in April. I go to Planning and Zoning Commission meetings, I’ve never seen any one from the taxpayers association there. This is where the costs are coming from, it is our growth so if we allow the Town to grow, we must take with it the cost of growth and that is our annual budget. Every year we go through this process; every year we try to jockey and I don’t think
we can continue doing this financially, emotionally, spiritually or any way you want to cut it. Maybe we should start putting Planning & Zoning commission up there where you are sitting and answer directly to the cost of growth. If we don’t start having an honest conversation with one another about the direction we want to take this Town and how much it’s going to cost and how much that will bear for each one of us regardless of our generation, we cannot be honest with ourselves, we cannot be honest with the budget. We cannot continue to stand up here every April and try to jockey one louder than the other, one emailing more than the other, it’s not working and you folks have no way of telling until you send it out there and wait for the referendum results to come in. I think in the next month we have the opportunity to look at the growth, put the Planning & Zoning Commission up with you in this Town meeting, that’s why you
call a Town meeting. Start talking about the cost of services …….
Mr. Harrison: We would be tempted very cheerfully to trade places with anybody who would rather be sitting up here facing the decisions we have to face. Unfortunately, the Charter puts it in our lap. But thank you for your suggestions.
Steve McGuff, 146 Old Mill Road: This process, as I stated last year as I stood at this podium, is a process of finding creative solutions and compromises. I just want to compliment the three boards this year because they have done that. This is a great budget, I think you’ve worked together proactively, I’ve heard great creative solutions and actions that are being taken to support the goals that set forth in each budget. As a taxpayer and as a business leader in this community, I support this and compliment you.
Annie O’Brien, 62 Stony Corners Circle: I’m just upset because Mr. McGuff beat me to it. I also want to extend thanks to all the volunteers that are here this evening. The Board of Education, the Board of Finance, the Town Council, the Avon Fire Department, and so many others in the crown who dedicate endless hours to making sure this Town is a safe and comfortable place for everyone to be. I’m a parent of 4 children, 3 of whom are now in college at the moment, so I would be delighted to see my taxes be lower than they are. We can use every penny we could possibly get. I would like to say my children, as well as the previous speakers have mentioned, have been so well served by the Avon school system and as a parent I would like to extend my thanks for that
to everybody here. There are on to very bright futures. As a teacher here in Avon, I’m a 4th grade teacher at Pine Grove Elementary School and I just want to take a moment to put a human face on some of the numbers here. I’m not a strong numbers person, but I do well in 4th grade math. I trust the numbers that are here and people who are behind those number but in particular I would like to draw your attention, on Page 5 of the Board of Education budget, it talks about special education services and disabilities mandating. I guess I just really want to make the point that we live in such a different world today than the world when I was in 4th grade in the early 60’s. At that time, our class sizes were large, and we all sat down and as happy as it was, we all learned the very same thing and we were all pretty identical, I think. If you come into the classrooms now, I think you would see a
much diverse population of students and that’s only to the benefit of every child that is there. Not only is there diversity in the terms of racial background and economic background and social background, but also in terms of learning needs. Our Board of Education and our Superintendent give us the responsibility of differentiating instruction for each and every child according to their needs and their special learning requirements. If you look at the chart at the bottom of page 5, it lists just some of the particular challenges that our students face. Although I can’t name names, and I can’t give a slide show of my class in action, fully one fourth of my students receive special services and that requires the expertise of so many people, our administrators, our principal, our vice principal and as tempting as it is to say – let’s cut administrators, let’s cut salaries, they are so intimately involved with the life of
every child who has special needs. Also our special services team, our speech and language therapist, nobody sits around eating bon bons in the Avon Public Schools. Everybody is working extremely hard to serve the needs of a much diverse population of students than there were back in the 50’s or 60’s or earlier years. I just think it’s so important that you recognize that these numbers come from the professionals that are needed to service these children so they can go out into the world and contribute to the very best of their abilities. I would never want to go back to the time where we had children with special needs separated, in a different classroom or a different school. That wouldn’t be good for anybody, the typical children or those with special needs. Everyone is well served by that. Whether you have someone in your family, someone in your workplace, someone in your neighborhood who is a person with
special needs, you start to realize that those learning differences require a whole different set of practices. Its one on one size fits all situation any more. Teachers and all of us in the support team are trained to accommodate those needs and to differentiate them. When you look at those numbers, I hope you can see the childrens’ faces behind those numbers because they have been well served by you, but any further cuts would be, as was said before, cutting into the bond of the program. Every possible luxury has been long since cut away and I urge you to accept the budgets from the Town and the Board, as submitted.
Adam Lazinsk, 88 Deepwood Drive: I have a question for Ms. Roell. On page 4 of your chart, there’s a pie chart which shows transportation costs. I’m sure everyone who has been stuck in traffic on West Avon Road on a school day morning, and speaking personally as a police officer who conducts traffic in and out of the high school, I see bus after bus go virtually empty. I’m wondering if there are any cost savings that can be achieved in future transportation arrangements with the bus company about consolidating buss routes.
Ms. Roell: Actually three years ago, when Thompson Brook opened, prior to that we had separate bus runs to the high school, the middle school, to the elementary schools. So three separate times, the buses went through Town. With the opening of Thompson Brook one option was to have a fourth run and that option would have cost about $300,000 per year and the Board of Ed’s budget committee said that’s pretty crazy since the high school buses appear to be fairly empty. At that time we changed the schedule for the middle school – the middle school and high school now ride the bus together. Dattco has 21 buses that service Avon. Each bus holds about 50 kids of the middle school/high school age and size, so we have room for about 1100 children to receive bus
transportation. If you add up 900 kids at the high school and the 600 kids at the middle school, if they all decide to take the bus one day, it would be a joke on us because you would have 1500 kids on buses that only seat 1100. To answer your question, we did cut back once to save money, can we cut it more? There’s a State law that says we have to provide transportation and how much more we can combine, I’m not sure it’s really there.
Trish Murphy, 135 Tamara Circle: We’ve lived here 5 years, we’ve survived the last 3 colorful referenda – I actually jotted down some notes. Ironically it’s pretty much what everything Mrs. Muench mentioned. I did want to make some comments. First of all, Mr. Paine’s comment about thinking outside the box – I think we should all take note of that to endorse another way to save some money. Secondly, I actually want to congratulate the Avon taxpayers association – they are such a well oiled machine. I just would like to comment that all well oiled machines need attention and from what I read, I feel like every year you just cut the rate. I feel the proposed rate is fair, I was frankly surprised how low it was and I was not surprised a
couple of days late to see that they’re proposing cutting half, knowing that ¾ of that increase are fixed costs. A third comment I’d like to make is I found it very interesting in the 175th Anniversary, there are some pictures of a teen club in 1956 and several parents have mentioned over the years that it would be great if we had something like this for our kids to keep them away from drugs, keep them away from alcohol, something creative and wholesome for them to do. I wonder how many of these people are now enjoy the Senior Center, what do the kids get? We can’t even afford library books. My last comment is about the condition in the Town. It wasn’t going to be a big part of my comments tonight, but it’s very sad. We moved here for two reasons, a central community and for the good schools. I’m sitting in the back and I’d love to get a group of parents and group of people who don’t have children in schools to talk about what’s important to them. Maybe we can come to a
compromise. I would also like to invite anyone who does not have children to come to the schools, you’ll see there’s no fluff there. Teachers are working hard, teachers contribute a lot of money and there is no extra there and I really don’t want to see any more cuts.
Risa Cappadona, 183 Deercliff Road: I would just like to go with what Val had to say because I think she had a very salient point about the growth and development of this Town. What I see in the division is a generational divide and also a socio-whatever divide where the Town has changed and developed. I think, in a way, that the senior generation – I think the sense and I could be wrong feels so much disenfranchised, like this is no longer the Town that they knew and loved. I think when I moved here 12 years ago and sometimes I feel that way myself. I get stuck in traffic on Route 44, West Avon Rd., there are more car accidents, the quality of life since I’ve moved here I feel has quite frankly deteriorated because of the growth in Town. Given that,
it’s a wonderful place to live – I’m very grateful for the school system but I do think the growth and development – what they project it to be like in 10 or 15 years, it’s going to be Hackensack, New Jersey, you know. Is everybody going to be sitting in traffic for 45 minutes on the way home? Are the schools going to deteriorate and then the property values go down. Where do we see ourselves going in 10 or 15 years. I’ve been here 12 years and I wouldn’t recognize the Town if I came back and hadn’t been here for 10 or 12 years. That’s my comment. I think it’s very important and that’s the big picture. It’s like everybody is fighting these emotional issues and fighting for the crumbs - $200 here and $200 there on their yearly taxes. I cannot believe that that is going to make rift giving all due respect to people and in common. I know fixed incomes are hard
and costs of everything are constantly going up up up all the time on everything and you’re stuck driving cars while gas is going up and insurance is going up. But $200 a year, it doesn’t make rational sense that this is going to make or break somebody’s budget. So that’s my …..
Hema DaSilva, 78 Bronson Road: Just listening to this meeting as it moves along makes me think about some of the situations that we’ve gone through over the years. I’ve been in Town since 1988, all my children have been through the school system and are out of school now and I don’t have a college fund. So, I don’t resent paying the $200, but I think you also have to realize that ….. some of the seniors that are on fixed income are going through hard times and some have children that are still in school so they are not insensitive to the needs of the school, the needs of the system and the cost that it incurs.
Mandates ……………….. are coming from the same pockets. In the final analysis we, as citizens of this country do have to bear the cost of all of those. We have to be very conscious of the fact there are some who are …… we have to understand that and whining and all those kinds of statements, I don’t think really needs to be imposed on ….. One observation I made this evening, just to put on the table again, we lost one of our leaders in John Paul II and the President ordered that flags be at half mast. Coming down West Avon Road this evening, I noted that in our high school, the flags were at full mast. I didn’t know if this was arrogance, or ineptitude. Thank You.
Barbara Panico, 95 Stony Corners Circle: I just have a couple of observations and then a question. First of all, I commuted to Hackensack for four years and it’s not where we want to go. Secondly, I find these sessions incredibly informative for me, that’s why I come. I come to be able to understand the issues and I usually leave knowing what they are and how I will vote. It’s clear that the division everyone’s talking about is continuing here. People are more concerned about – I know what everybody’s about to say when they walk in the door; the people I worry about are the people who aren’t here, which is the majority of the Town for whatever reason, who cannot make it. I wondered if any of the Boards would consider doing any kind
of polling the rest of the people, call 200 or 300 families and see what are they thinking. Do they have enough information to make an informed decision, if not have a mailing to receive that information so that it will be easier to determine a decision based on what they learned. Once those people are polled, if you find they don’t have enough information, get it out to them. If they feel they do have enough information, have they made a decision, will they support the budget, why, why not, and then go from there because we just don’t enough about what the other people are thinking. Thank you.
Mr. Harrison: I can’t respond specifically but I can say that it’s very frustrating to the people on all three boards to face the fact that we don’t get very good turnout. Last year was the very first time we had a voting turnout at the 40% range. My colleague Tom Gugliotti made the comment a couple of years ago that Democracy does impose some obligations on the citizens, as well. The Town is trying, and each year we do more and more in terms of getting information out. The slide presentations, for example have been up on the website, budget information is on the website, we publicize these hearings and the meetings and the voting times. We would like, and I would be very happy if we had 90% of the people turn out to vote, we don’t get that and I
don’t know if we will this year so I appreciate and understand your concern about where do the silent stand, what do the absent advocate, I don’t know either. To the extent we do polling, that gets into issues beyond what the focus of this hearing is, but it’s a suggestion we’ll be happy to consider.
Justin Spalla, 17 Oxbow Drive: I drive a school bus and about the comments about the school bus, I just had to laugh. If every student rode on the bus there wouldn’t be enough space – also if you look at the other grades, the buses are over crowded and they are going to come to Avon High School and they will be crowded also. Right now you have a lot of people who come to the high school, if you took the gas money they are spending there, you could probably ….. It’s not really a problem with the school buses, it’s a problem with people who just want to drive their kids to school. Thank you.
Chris Kaswer, 35 Hemlock Lane: A couple of people mentioned earlier, actually addressed the root cause why we have these wonderful, lively debates every year and it has to do with growth. It seems to me there’s got to be some way – my question to any of you is how is it that we can make the zoning board responsible and accountable for the decisions that they make on the way the Town land and property is being zoned out and developed. Clearly they have tremendous power with any accountability tied to the monies that the different boards need to come up with for budgets that we are asked to voted on. To me, that just doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m really surprised that nothing’s been done about that to this date. You can get and have companies
operate like that, you’d go out of business. I think it’s pretty clear here taking a look back at the last few years, what’s been going on is we’ve been barely getting by and it’s just after referendum has been turned down, another one gets turned down., it really isn’t working properly. We’re behind on different projects, we spend money on …… There is an organization at the company I work at who wanted to put up a building and didn’t have any justification for putting in proper equipment, or the sales of a product; there’s no way they would be able to get away with that. I don’t think the zoning board should be able to get away with being able to continue to allocate land for whatever use without some justification and accountability back to the Town and the other boards to make sure that it in check. So my question to you is how can that happen, and would you be able to start
some kind of a process to make that board also get tied in tight.
Mr. Hines: I spent five years on the Planning and Zoning Commission many years ago, 1970-75, Chairman for most of that time. When you get appointed to Planning and Zoning, you operate under State Statutes. You do not report to any of the Boards in the Town; that’s the way it’s set up under State Statutes. The Planning and Zoning have a Comprehensive Plan of Development; every 10 years they have to update it, that’s a guide for future development. They have open Public Hearings and there has been practically no one from the Town who attended those meetings. They had every opportunity. Any time there’s a major sub-division there’s a public hearing, the public can come – you don’t get anybody there. This Town allows every
opportunity to do that and they have not come out. Last year after the budget session we heard quite a bit from the residents that said development is a problem. The Town Council sent a letter to the Planning & Zoning Commission saying we’ve heard many of these comments. As you are updating the Plan of Development, please consider this idea. They have worked extensively, they did a survey done by the University of Connecticut, the survey came back saying the Town was happy the way development has gone. There has been just the opposite that’s come in here. The Town can come in and put all kinds of regulations, but over the years the Town’s been able to get the developers to put in all the road construction, put in utilities, etc., they received Open Space or Grant money for use of open space. A lot of things have been done in that area, but right now, there is not much participation at the Planning and Zoning Meetings. (Mr. Kaswer) I was expecting to hear that, people just
are not taking advantage of being involved. How do we tie in the people her, the residents, to becoming part of that process. One of the ways was by that survey. There were over 300 people on a random basis, to give that kind of input. Recently, the Chamber of Commerce wanted their input included; they had a meeting with Planning & Zoning – there’s another meeting. Planning & Zoning has been looking for input for a long time.
Mr. Harrison: It goes to Barbara’s point, you have to get people willing to take the time and make the commitment. It’s very difficult to interpret silence. Does it mean they are satisfied, or does it mean something totally different. We don’t know the answer. Dick, when does the Town Planning & Zoning Commission meet? (Every other Tuesday in the Selectmen’s Chamber at Town Hall). Meetings are open and there’s usually an opportunity for the public to make comments. I urge you to let the Planning & Zoning how you feel.
(NO NAME – Spoke before) I just want to add on one thing – If you rephrase the question, not are you happy but, if the voting was right now, would you be willing to pay more taxes- yes; do you want services cut-no; people don’t want services cut. Do you want the quality of education to go down-no. Well, if you have more development, this is what you’ll have to get. I think if you rephrase the question, …..
Margaret Bratton, Old Mill Road: Thank you to all three boards for working together. Although I haven’t been able to attend as many meetings as I have in the past, I just want to talk about the increase in spending. For the last 10 years the Annual Operating Budgets have increased by ……. It seems like the 1995-99 budget increases seem to be lower than average. 1995-last year, the average was 1% higher per year. And there were budget defeats. Maybe that’s something to look at, maybe it should be based on the CPI. She thinks it’s wrong to discuss the budget without including the other projects that are coming up in the future. My final though is considering the items coming up in the future, a budget increase of 2.5% over last years budget
would be acceptable.
Mrs. Roell: After looking over Margaret’s figures for student costs over the past 10 years compared to CPI. It’s interesting to see that since 1995, our per student cost has gone up 22.9%, the CPI has gone up 24%. While the last few years have been high, on a 10 year bases, we are just slightly under CPI including this year’s proposed budget.
Angie Sum, Ridgewood Road: I just want to comment on the reference to tax increases over the last 10 years, the last 5 years, with revaluation; that’s good. But, I think we should make note somewhere of property value per tax rate because when you have a revaluation and you have a home that was $150,000 ten years ago and now you still live on the same great street where you lived before and it becomes a $400,000 home. You’re tax rate is going to go up. Maybe it means nothing to you personally and maybe it becomes a real tax burden, but that’s not anybody else’s in Town situation. The last time we had a reval, my personal taxes didn’t go up significantly, but that’s because my home is on the newer side. A home owner who has been in Town for 30
years and they are seeing their reval over a 10 year period, that’s good for them. They should be pleased with that. While they might have double digit increases in the last reval, I didn’t but that’s because I was paying more 5 years ago than they were. I think when we’re displaying increases, I think we should talk about per thousand, per hundred thousand, so that’s a little more idea of where the increases are.
Sir, with all due respect, I haven’t been home since 7:30 this morning;
Mr. Harrison: We’ve been up just as long as you, but we’ll be happy to accommodate you.
Kristina Scatchell, 15 Thornwood Lane: I would just like to comment that I have lived in this Town for 8-1/2 years. I’ve only attended the schools for 4 of those years and coming from a small private school with only 24 kids in my entire grade, to this school, I thought all the opportunities ….. however, over the past 4 years I’ve seen a large decrease in the number of electives offered to the students and I know personally that I want to be a teacher and that’s what I’m planning on doing and without the child development course, I would never have known that that’s what I wanted to do and I think it’s very important that all the home economic classes that were cut I believe 2 years ago, that those two courses have more emphasis put on them than the AP
classes and all those other classes that help kids prepare for college. I know the Town does get a kick back for the number of students that take AP courses, it is also important for students to have electives in order for them to explore different opportunities for what they want to become later on. Also, for students who may not be planning to attend college, there are some who cannot afford to attend college or do not have the grades to attend college. In the Town of Avon there is no opportunities to receive the education in high school to know what they want to do once they get out of college or what they want to do for the rest of their lives. I think more effort should on this should be put in the school budget.
Ms. Roell: Kristina, I agree with you that we need to have more electives. Just to correct one statement – the school does not get any kick-backs from the AP exams. Up through last year, the school paid about $82.00 for each student who took an AP class. Now, because of budget cuts, the parents now pay for these courses. ( Maybe it’s not money, but the school does get recognition for the students who take the AP exam.) It was US World News Report that has a study that calculates how many students taking AP classes, divided by the number of seniors in the high school. We are no where near getting on that list. Briefly, AP classes have been around for years, they’ve gotten to be more important in the past 10 years, colleges look very
strongly at what AP classes are offered in high schools and what AP classes our kids have selected. In the college admission process, because we don’t have as many AP classes as the larger schools, that could be a potential detriment. We do offer 13 AP classes currently. For kids who aren’t going to college there is also opportunities to go to vocational schools and technical high schools also. There are lots of opportunities for kids who aren’t college bound.
Mr. Harris: First of all, thank all of you for coming and sharing your thoughts and speaking from the heart. You haven’t made our job any easier, but we do appreciate the help you have offered. We’ll have a workshop on Wednesday, possibly the following Monday, we’ll have these posted on the website. Thank you and good night.
Meeting adjourned at 9:35 P.M.
Attest: Elinor Burns
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