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BOARD OF FINANCE
PUBLIC HEARING
MARCH 30, 2009
CHAIR BOARD OF FINANCE: Thomas Harrison
Chairman Harrison: You know that’s my big thrill of the year. Good evening and welcome. This is the annual budget meeting. We always look forward to this. We have an unusual year this year. A little bit different from what we have experienced in the past. You all know that. There is more than enough gloom and doom going around without predictions. I am going to make some predictions. Whatever the economic challenges are, I think, as a Town, we are going to get through it. It will be a little bit challenging for us, a little bit different from what we are used to, but at the end of the day, we will get a budget out of this. I am optimistic that it will go the first time. Nobody, I think, wants to go back to last year and it’s probably won’t be a budget that will make everybody happy, but it will work. I think that we will pull together. We have a lot of great power in this Town, a lot of good civic interest and enthusiasm and energy. And I for one am optimistic. We
will have to tighten our belts here and there, but we will make it. I think Avon will still be the best Town in the State to live in and to educate children in. And if we all stick together and keep it civil, as we generally do, we will get there. First, I would like to thank you, as I said. This is the Board of Finance’s annual budget hearing. It is the only one that we conduct on our own during the course of the year; it is required by the Town Charter. I will make the all too common announcement these days, if you have cell phones, if you could put it on silent or vibrate or something because I can just picture somebody making a dramatic point and the bell goes off. So, if you could, adjust your cell phones so they don’t interrupt anyone when they are giving their comments or something of that sort. Process tonight, I am going to introduce the Board of Finance. I will tell you a little bit about the order and then
we will get into the meat of it. There will be presentations by each of the three Boards. They will generally follow the handouts that you have received. They will explain the budgets. When we get to the Board of Finance presentation, it will be a little bit different from past years in that it is going to focus on the “Show Me the Money” question. We are going to talk about how we pay for all this and how does it affect you as a taxpayer, how does the reval affect you and where you can find that out specifically. So, that’s the program. When we get to the public questions and comments, like we say every year, we will stay here as late in the evening as we have to in order to give everyone a chance to speak. I will go over the ground rules a little bit later. So, let me introduce the Board of Finance. I’m Tom Harrison. I am the Chair of it. Next we have Brett Eisenlohr, Bill Hooper, Tom
Gugliotti, Jim Speich, and Cathy Durdan, Margaret Bratton and our very hard working Clerk, Alison Sturgeon. Alison will be recording for the purposes of creating minutes. When we get to the speaking comment part, we will remind you to give your name and address so we can keep track of it in the minutes. So, that’s it. The first order of business will be the presentation of the budget request by the, is the Town Council first this year? Does anybody remember? Okay. John Carlson will give the presentation for the Town Council followed by Peggy Roell from the Board of Education. So, John, are you ready to go? We will clear this table so we don’t block the slides. John reminded me that the Board of Finance generally opens its meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance. I forgot to do it, so why don’t we all stand.
Leads Audience in Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag
The Pledge of Allegiance was recited.
Thomas Harrison calls on Chair, Town Council to present the proposed Town Council, Sewer, Debt Services and Capital Improvement Budget for FY 2009/2010
John Carlson presents the Town Council Sewer, Debt Service and Capital Improvement Budget for FY 2009/2010
John Carlson: Good evening. I see a number of people standing in the back. There are a number of seats available up here in the front. They don’t charge any more for those. So, if you would like to make your way forward, please feel free to do so. My thanks to Tom for the introduction. I am John Carlson, Chairperson of the Board of, Town Council. I would like to start off by introduction of the other Council members. As I call out your name, because I am not exactly sure of where you are sitting, if you could stand please. Pam Samul, Bill Shea, David Pena, Mark Zacchio. Thank you very much. I am going to give you what I hope is a fairly brief, and I will try to move as quickly as possible, overview of our budget requests for
2009/2010. This budget was, work began on it last November. We worked on the capital improvement portion of it and then from there we move forward for the Town Department. In January and February, it was culminated in an all day meeting on the last Saturday in February, we did have a few votes there and we came up with the request that is in front of you tonight. Our objectives as we move forward into the budget were five fold. One, we certainly recognize and indeed many of us are certainly feeling it, that we wanted to adjust our budget requests to meet the economic realities and the times that we are in. We do feel the necessity to retain the core services and protect the investments that you have made as taxpayers in our core services, to protect safety and social services wherever possible. Our triple A bond rating is something that we have had for a number of years and the retention of that is extremely important to us and it indeed
saves us money when it is necessary for us to go out to bond. Retention of critical employees, we are blessed with a great group of employees that work for our Town, as does the Board of Education. The retention of them is extremely important to us. Where possible, rather than doing layoffs, we encouraged retirements and I will get into some detail on that in a moment. And to fund only those projects that we deemed as critical in the area of capital improvement. As I have said many times, and I was standing here when I was on the Board of Finance as well, that the worrisome nature of capital improvement projects is that they rarely go away and that when they come back, they usually come back at a higher dollar level just because of the inflationary impact. So, with that, those have been the five areas that we have focused on moving forward. Our budget requests for this year, I am going to talk about on each of these areas, actually not on
the sewers that much, but on three other areas here: the Town budget, the operating budget increase, or requested increase is 2.7% over the previous year. And I will have more detail on that. The sewer budget is funded through sewer fees. This is not a tax increase or a tax impact, but the sewer budget itself is actually going down by 4-9% from the previous year. The debt services is to fund previous obligations that have been voted on through Town referendums, school projects, Town hall projects, road improvements, acquisition of open space, for example M.H. Rhodes, acquisition of space down at Fisher Meadows. All that results in bonding. Our bond, our cost for this coming year are actually going down by 2.74%. And finally the capital improvement project was an area of the budget that we really went after and cut that down very substantially, by 24% over the previous year. So, overall, on the Town side of this, there is a
negative 1.1% request with compared with the previous budget item. Again, folks that have just come in, there are some open seats up here in the front, which you are welcome to come and join us. The budget drivers for this year are what’s, what are we going to feel? First of all, the revaluation, which is a State mandated thing that we have to go through every five years. Secondly, you can only pick up the paper or listen to the radio or television to hear a lot about the State’s budget woes and we will feel those in terms of reduced State grants and aids. The good news for us, compared to many other Towns, and certainly the cities, is that we will not feel this to the degree that they do because over the years, we have gotten far less than others. So, I guess that is somewhat of a silver lining in that. Challenging economic climate, again, we feel that your ability to pay, or our ability to pay, because we are all taxpayers as
well, and with the downturn in the markets, we have lost some revenue in the investment income area and various fees are down, so, those have all put pressures on us. In particular, the pension costs are something that shouldn’t be ignored. Over the past five years, we have seen a 46% increase in our pension costs. We have been able to do some things to curtail that, as new employees have joined our payroll. Secondly, we have felt a big budget pinch this year in snow and ice removal. For the past couple of years, I am sure that you have seen it as you go through Town, we have moved away from the sand to the use of salt, which is great because in the spring, there is a lot less to clean up, it does not fill up our catch basins, and indeed, it will save us money over time, but the cost of salt, as more and more towns and cities move to its use, has increased and we have felt that. And finally, the third big budget increase in our operating
budget is hydrant rentals. For 2007, the Department of Public and Utility Commission, DPUC that is, granted the Avon Water Company a 100% increase in their fees. As that has filtered down to us, we have felt a $227,000 increase in our costs, so those are all costs that are reflected in our budget. We will get into those in a few minutes. I am going to spend a few minutes talking about the larger departments in terms of budget and it’s the department that probably most of you see and feel when you drive around Town, our road miles increased by 12 miles since 2002, so we are now up to maintaining 108 miles of road, almost 109 miles of road, and that’s a big driver of cost for us. I will come back to that in a second. We average 19 snow storms per year, despite Doppler, we are not good at predicting that, but we budget for an average of 19 per year and interesting, a half an inch of ice can cost us as much as six inches of snow,
depending on when it comes down, for example, does it hit us on a weekend or holiday, how many times do the trucks need to go out, is this a storm that takes ten hours or a storm that takes two hours. All of those things weigh in. We have 117,000 square feet of office space or building space that we need to maintain. We do outsource most of our cleaning services on the Town side and we do maintain those as well. I won’t go through each one of those. We maintain a number of vehicles both on the Board of Education side as well as the Town side. This is all done by our Public Works Department. I know that we have many representatives from that Department here tonight and my thanks for the great work that they do. One area of budget impact that we had really seen go, increased at a much higher rate than we would like is the area of the landfill, solid waste expenditures and revenues. The blue line here represents our
expenditures over the past five or six years. As you can see, it has gone up greatly, but we were able to bring that down quite a bit in the last year. We have done a number of things to effect that, for example, we have moved to the solid, let me make sure that I use the term right, the solid single stream recycling. That is putting all of your recycles into one barrel. That does save us a lot of money and I think it makes it easier for the Town’s people as well. We have moved and we are planning to move to electronic recycling, which will help us in that area as well. So, the less we have to cart away from the landfill to Hartford, the more we save. So that is an issue for us. We have increased our fees, we did this in July of 2008 up there. So, at this point, we are almost at a point where this is a self sustaining operation, which this is the right way to go in this area. The Public Works Department has done a
number of things to decrease their overall costs. I don’t know if Bruce is here, but he has done a great job. In particular, they have reduced their staff, they have done this a couple of ways. First of all, they had four retirements up there in the department and they have not backfilled any of those. Secondly, they have moved to outsource some of these services. Now, that comes to us at a short term cost savings. It also comes to us with some risk because as we move into outsourcing, this opens up the potentiality for union grievances, and we do have a number of those filed against us at this point. We are fighting each one of those, but recognize that this is a real issue that we must face. Finally, in an area that we have been able to save some money on is the heating and cooling of the Town public works facility. I want to thank you because you funded a new roof and you funded garage doors up there, although those
sound minor, they actually pay back very handsomely for us and reduce heating and cooling costs, so, it was a good expenditure for us to make and we are seeing a positive return on them. As I said in the past and I want to say it again, and I know that the Chief, who is standing right there, the Chief of the Fire Department is with us, Jaime DiPace. This is one of the few volunteer activities that I know of that when you volunteer you place your life on the line. And I want to thank them. They do a tremendous work for us. Last year they responded to over 700 calls, almost 800 calls for us and if you would join me in a round of applause. Their calls went up by 44% last year and over the previous year, I’m sorry, over the past five years, they have gone up by 44%. At the same time, they have maintained their budget; it has gone up by about 34%, so this service that they provide, they are going up at a rate higher than the budget, which
is a good thing for all of us. And again, my thanks to all of them. On to the Police Department, their calls actually have gone down over the previous five years. They had gone up on these calendar year as have the Fire Department calls versus fiscal years. The calls have gone up over the past year for a number of reasons. Over the past five years, they have gone down and there is an interesting phenomenon there. We are actually down our staff levels there, for a number of reasons. First of all, it takes a long time to do due diligence in the hiring of a police officer. About 54 weeks total, so it takes us a long time to hire a qualified officer. Secondly, you have a number of officers in training. Much like the Fire Department, the training requirements for the Police Department go up, some mandated by the State and Federal law, some because it is the right thing to do each year. And in so doing, we have less people
out there responding to calls. We have had retirements in the Police Department that have impacted us. Finally we have and we are blessed to have two police officers that have been called up for military duty. And we are grateful for their service to their country, but it certainly does cost us in terms of having the people here to staff them, so with all that, we have fewer people out there responding to calls and to do the types of investigations that we want. There are repercussions. Some of the things that we have done to impact our overall budget request, again, the Town operating budget request is going up, the request is up by 2.7% over the previous year. I won’t read through the list. You will see a number of things on this list. We are looking, in addition to a number of things to do, for example, changing the landfill days, which potentially will save us another $7,000. You see that we have pared down the DARE
program. We have cut the DARE program. I will say that that is a personal favorite of mine. Both of my children participate in that when they were in the school system. It’s funded, though, through the Town budget, and I am sorry to see this one go. It brings me to a point that I would like to make. We made a lot of tough cuts and there may be more cuts that we have to make after tomorrow night and tonight. And I would ask that as you come forward to the microphone, that if we have cut one of what I will call your favorite programs, rather than just saying please don’t cut it, I would ask that you tell us well, what should we cut at this point, because this is our best approach to it. If you have got other ideas, we are certainly open to them, but that is one that I hate to see go. I am grateful to say that we are working right now with Avon/Canton rotary to see whether there might be some funds available through
them to help us reinstate some of this, but that is a potential cut. The police vehicles, we did cut two police vehicles from this year’s budget request to help meet the needs of the budget. So, I am not going to go through the whole list, some of this is a continuation of previous years. Unfortunately, in the previous budget cycle, we cut back on the library hours. This year, on this year’s requested budget, we cut that back further in terms of the November and December Sunday’s as well. We hated to do that, but that was something that we needed to do to meet the economic times that we find ourselves in. There are really four aspects of staff costs. I am going to spend a minute or two on these. One is purely the number of people that we have in our employment. Secondly, the wages that we pay those folks, and thirdly, the benefits that they get through the Town and fourth, and I have already talked about this,
the services that we offer. So, we have cut back services and many times we have cut back staffing. And that is what this page is. You will see that our overall wage area, which is the salary area, is going up by less than 1%, and that is in the bottom right hand corner of the slide, .53%. Wages are going up by 2.7%. We offset that increase by cutting back in a number of areas. We have reduced a full time clerk to part time. We have actually reduced three positions up there from full to part time. We eliminated a police officer position for three quarters of the year; we plan on putting it in later in the year. We eliminated a couple of the public works positions in terms of half going back to half year versus funding it right up front, and our building official, obviously building permits are down substantially. We have reduced that to a part time position. So, with all of that, we were able to save $187,000 with
the budget to offset the anticipated increase in the salary (inaudible), so overall, that line item is going up by .53%. Our employment growth over the past five years has actually been, we have actually gone down this year three positions, so there are three less positions in 2009/2010 than there were in 2008/2009. So, at the end of this year, this planned year, we will have 106 full time positions and 126 part time positions, so we have gone down by one part time position. Well, at the same time if you look over the five year trend here, you see that our population has gone up by 23% and our full time employment has gone up by a little less than 5%. We have a number of strategies, actions that we take into, to address our wage and salary line and address our overall personnel costs. We have requested and received some voluntary wage reductions. I will talk for a second about pensions, a fairly complicated area. We in 1996 moved away from
the defined benefit program. The defined benefit program, I am sure that we have folks here that have those, which guaranteed you a percentage of your income, whether that was your average of your three or five highest paid years, you got 60% of that or something of that nature. We have moved away from that program in 1996 with all new employees and went to a cash benefit program. There has been a substantial savings to the Town in doing so. Another example of a cost savings strategy that we have undertaken. We moved, on the health insurance side for new employees, were they pay 20% of the premium. Previous employees paid 15%. We have a very different health benefit plan than, for example Simsbury. Our family plan costs us about $19,000 for our Town employees and their families. Simsbury pays about $29,000. We reduced our retiree health benefits to 50% of the overall costs. Simsbury, I don’t mean to pick on
them, but in a second you will see why, they pay about 75% - 100% of their retiree health costs. So, that has been a big savings for us. We are hiring new employees at a lower wage basis and eliminating where ever we can, both full time and part time positions. I bring up all this because it is always headline grabbing when you see a unions saying that we will give you a give back, we are going to hold our wage increase for the coming year or the coming two years. And all that I ask is that you look beyond that and say, okay, what else is going on. If there is a union giveback, is there something else that they might be getting down the road. We look at the total cost of the program and not just the wages here. And these are actions that we have taken in our negotiations to impact the overall wage cost. I have touched upon most of this already, we do believe that we are offering smaller pay increases in return for concessions, so if
you see a pay increase in there, it is most likely because we got something in return for it. We don’t just give those out willy nilly. And in the long term, we believe that the overall cost to us of funding our employees is going in the right direction. This chart, which I will take a moment to explain, I have listed two of our neighboring Towns here, Simsbury and Farmington. This year, they are going up 3% and this, and all Town employees, in the Town of Simsbury are unionized Town employees, not the teachers, just the Town employees, Farmington is all of the teachers, excuse me. Thank you Blythe. Farmington, um, Simsbury is going up by 3% in this current budget year, next year is zero percent. Farmington, 3 ½% and next year is zero. We are in negotiations with our Police union and this current year, they did receive a 3% increase in their wages. Next year, we don’t know where we will end up, but we are
certainly working hard to contain that. The public works department is under a contract that calls for a 3 ¼% increase in each of the next three years, including this one, I should say. And the dispatchers both 3% next year and then the following year we will be negotiating a new contract. So, we have approached each of those unions. There are footnotes on the bottom of the slide in terms of their response to us regarding those. But, I want to make sure that we are clear on something here. We do have, as I said earlier, a very different situation as is reflected in our benefit costs. We do not have a defined benefit plan that these other Towns may or may not have. Simsbury is one that does. We have a different health care cost structures. As many of you know, which is very controversial, we moved our health care from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to Cigna earlier this year on both the Board of Ed side and on the Town
side. Our expected savings is somewhere between two and three hundred thousand dollars in doing so. So, you need to look at it in its entirety, not just look at the wage line or perhaps the headline. Next, you have been very clear to us over the years and I think that to a great extent, where ever we can, we are working cooperatively with both within the Town side and the Board of Education side as well as with other Towns. This is just a listing here, I won’t go through it. Some of the programs that we have going on between the Town side and the Board of Education side is tough to actually quantify the actual dollar savings, but certainly they are there for us and they will continue to be there for us. Looking more broadly across other Towns, we are participating in 90 programs with other Towns. A couple of examples of those, in Canton, we share assessing services and social services and animal control. Those are all services
that we don’t, the employee may be with us, but we actually receive revenues from Canton because we do share those services with them. Harry works both in Canton and in Avon, but is an Avon employee, and I am glad that you are. Farmington, we share with them Dial-a-Ride, ambulance services, paramedic services, youth services, etc. So, those are things that we are currently doing. We are looking at some new initiatives, but these are all under negotiations at this point. We will look at the Farmington Valley Trail maintenance, which you know is a 26 mile trail that goes all the way up to the Massachusetts border. We are looking to share services and equipment between eight Towns that maintain that trail. The regionalization of emergency services is something that we are working on right now with both Simsbury and Canton, that is the dispatching services there, and then finally, the building official services. We are doing this on
a part time basis with Burlington, so regional services that we are trying to do with both Farmington and Simsbury and Burlington. On the debt service side, as I said earlier, our debt service peaks this year and will begin going down next year. The yellow line here is the interest that we pay on our existing debt and the green line is the principle, so that you can see that it will continue to go downhill for the next few years, which is a very good thing. We, earlier this year, being the Town Council, took action not to move forward with the library project. That does not mean that we are not supportive of the library project, but (inaudible) very clear and made a heartfelt and logical case for why the library needs to be expanded. As you may know, you acquired land surrounding the library over the past few years and that has given us the opportunity to expand the library when we can. The question is when we can. So, we did delay moving
forward with the referendum on this matter. It will be brought back before the Town Council sometime this summer for further consideration, but again, we won’t be able to take action on that on our own. We will bring it to the Town in the form of a referendum. Of course, the failure of the recent referendum on the Town Clerk’s vault, which is a State mandated project, which has impacted our debt service as well and that we can’t fund something that you have said no to. There are our five capital improvement projects. Last year, we funded the first year of a two year project, which is the replacement of the police communication services. We recognize that this is a matter of safety (inaudible) we do not have adequate communications between dispatching and police officers or between the hub and the police officers. This is the second year of that two year project. Rotary services (inaudible) many times when I am
talking to the Town residents, I hear the comment made, well, we cut the budget and we didn’t feel a difference in this past year. This is the area that I would say, you probably wouldn’t feel it next year, but you will feel it in subsequent years because when you don’t resurface the roads, we are stuck with the necessity to rebuild the roads and rebuilding a road is much more expensive than resurfacing the roads. So, this is one that we really need to be careful of because it is an easy one to remove, a portion of or all from the budget, to say that you won’t feel it, but you will down the years. Another example, although it is not here, but I will talk about it for one second. We have a triple A bond rating. You should be very proud of that. We are one of 14 or 16 towns that enjoy a triple A bond rating. We enjoy that because of the hard work that you have done and that we have done over the years. One of the
things that they look at, they being Moody’s and S&P, when they come in to do their review of us, is our reserves for things like retiree health care and our reserves for other matters having to do with retirees, retiree pension costs and other, those types of things. It is easy in any year to cut those items down in the budget, okay, and kind of risk it, but, when you do, you also risk that when they come back in to do the re-evaluation of us, that triple A rating drops down to double A or perhaps worse. And in such a case, you are going to pay a higher interest cost, so it is something that we need to be very careful of not doing, well, it looks like a short term gain, pay it, we will pay for it in the long term. Back to the capital improvement projects, Deepwood Drive, this is being paid for through sewer fees. This is a quarter of a million dollar project. The public works salt shed replacement project is something, as I said earlier, we
have moved away from sand to salt. The salt shed, there are various rumors as to how this was built at the public works facility. Mark Zacchio takes credit for building most of it on his lunch hour when he used to work there. It was built by Town employees and we are grateful for that, but it needs to be replaced. Indeed, what we need to do there is to protect the asset, which is the expensive salt that we have been buying, to spread out on the roads. You just can’t have it exposed to the elements until it is the right time to do so. Finally, this is the first of a two year project, to replace one of our dump trucks that we used for snow plowing. As you can see, these are not inexpensive items. This is a $190,000 dump truck that is fully outfitted with a plow and all of the communication equipment and all of the elements that are a part of that truck. Like we do with a lot of our capital projects, we don’t bond them. We do them over multiple years so we can save the
interest costs in doing so, but this is the way we do it, one or two years or sometimes two or three years. So, those are the top five capital projects for this year. We did defer a number of projects that are listed here and I won’t go through them, but these are projects that we would be hard pressed to say that these aren’t necessary, it’s just the question of the timing and the economic reality that we face, so we have deferred these that are up here. We are funding $1.5 million, almost $1.6 million worth of projects in our budget. I will not go into detail on the property taxes and assessments. Mr. Harrison will be doing so in a few minutes, but our grand list is going up due to the revaluation, and Tom will talk to that issue. It is going up by about 15.6%. My thanks to you. We had one of the highest collection rates in the State of Connecticut. Actually, the third highest collection rate, 99.93% of all
taxes assessed and that does make life much easier for our Town employees, of course, they have to collect them, but it is well for us and our finances. Overall, in summary, again, the Town operating side, we have requested a 2.7% increase and the sewers are self-funded by the sewer fees, which are going down next year. Debt service we are bringing down by 2.74% over the previous year’s budget. And finally, a capital improvement projects are down by almost 25%. So, overall, on the Town side, the requested budget is down by a little over 1% this year. My thanks, sorry, in the back of the room, I don’t know where Virginia is, there she is, if you see Virginia Vocelli, you can sign up to be on our list serve, which will give you the opportunity, to have sent to you, electronically notices of Town meetings or referendums, other Town matters, or you can go online to the website that is given here and do it that way. So, either way, but we
would encourage you to do so. We have a lot of people out there now, and we just want to have the opportunity to get more folks out. My thanks to all of your for spending time and showing up. It is a great attendance. At this time, I will turn it over to Tom. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison calls upon Chair, Board of Education to present the proposed Board of Education Budget for the FY 2009/2010
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, John, excellent presentation as always. Now, we are going to hear from Peggy Roell to talk about the school budget. There are still some chairs up here in the front for those of you who are standing in the back or sitting along the side and if you would like to sit down, you are more than welcome to move forward. You don’t get called on, you don’t have to worry about that if you are sitting up front.
Peggy Roell presents Board of Education budget
Peggy Roell: Thank you, Tom. I would like to start by introducing the Board of Ed members that are here and just stand up as I call your name. Doug Evans, Mike Eagan, Bill Stokesbury, Bernadette Mayer, Angela Shelton, Ken Notestine, Barbara Zuras, Houston are you here? And Houston Lowry. Well, the time has come that I can’t do this without my reading glasses, as much as I hate to admit that. The education budget is not just about numbers, taxes and mill rates, it’s about our children and the education that our community expects for its children. We all want our children to succeed and eventually be contributing members of their community. This budget not only represents numbers, but also represents a moral and legal obligation to educate our
children. We need to be able to count on our children to have the knowledge, skill and integrity to meet the challenges of the 21st century head on. When we talk about teacher salaries tonight, hopefully we can remember that it is important for us to attract, hire and retain the most skilled and talented teachers possible. When we talk about the increase in cost for special education, it is our legal and moral obligation to make sure that every child that walks through our doors has the opportunity to experience success and be educated with their peers in their home school. In preparing this budget, both the administration and the Board of Ed were aware of, not only the current economic situation, but we remember clearly the budget challenges of the past. This coupled with a greater accountability at the Federal, State and local levels and an even greater expectation for continued higher levels of student achievements, made the budget
preparation process quite a challenge. How do we tell student that are competing with student from neighboring districts for college admission that the education program cannot be the same caliber and as a result, they may not have the preparation required to get accepted to the college of their choice. Our proposed budget this year represents a 3% increase for next year over this current year. The preparation of this budget, back last November and December, the principal’s proposed budget that required a 6.9% increase in spending. They are expressing their professional assessment of the needs of our children and the funds needed to sustain the current levels of achievement. The Superintendent, who understood their position, recognized their proposals would not be acceptable to the community as a whole, and he needed to work with the principals to achieve a lower budget proposal, which reflected regrettable reductions in materials and programs. Dr. Kisiel reduced the
principal’s budget request by almost $1.2 million, affecting students at all of our schools in order to arrive at his 3.9% proposal. The Board of Ed, recognizing the difficult fiscal times and the political realities getting a budget above 3% approved, reduced the proposed budget to 3%, recognizing that there would be ongoing debate about what program, staff or services should be reduced or eliminated. What makes up the $44.3 million proposed operating budget? There is not a single piece of this pie that isn’t important. Each piece is important and connected with a cost of educating our children. Every piece of this pie affects the kind of education our children receive. The details of all these numbers are in the Board of Ed newsletter that was mailed to your house last week. So our budget goal this year is to maintain the constructional integrity of the program quality in our schools in a cost effective manner while remaining
cognizant and responsive to the current fiscal conditions and the Federal and State and local level. To help us achieve this goal, the administration and the Board use these strategies to guide their thinking and deliberations in reaching a budget proposal. Tonight I would like to tell you a story or explain how we use these criteria to create our budget proposal. Our first criteria was to review reductions in personnel and programs in the current budget. We wanted to be certain that these reductions even distributed the impact of our decisions throughout the district. This slide lists the proposed reductions in current personnel. No new personnel are proposed in this budget. We value all of these people and the work and contributions they make on behalf of our children. It is with a heavy heart that we propose any of these reductions. We know the elimination of these professionals will change the educational opportunities and
experiences for our children. We will continue to change the educational landscape in Avon and it will certainly be different than what Avon residents have come to expect and which our schools in Town are known. We can continue to debate which positions should or should not be eliminated, however, what reductions we consider, they will affect the education our children receive. The bottom line is we are causing fewer professionals to have a positive impact on our students. It takes many different adults to help educate a child. We know, from experience, the value that these people provide to our schools. Reduction of these positions will affect the day to day operations of our schools in many ways. It will impact how responsive our schools can be to parent’s questions and concerns, how available our schools can be a support community organization and events, and how our schools will begin to look. This slide shows the impact of
our proposed budget reductions on programs and the delivery of our education program. All communities are discussing program and personnel reductions. A neighboring community, however, is struggling with budget reductions, which would eliminate their full day kindergarten program and world language in grade 2. It is unfortunate that in Avon, we are talking about reducing core programs that are considered basic in many other communities. Again, we can debate the merits of many of these decisions, but the Board felt strongly about the need to impose no higher than a 3% increase in spending and to get there, we had to propose reductions, as unpopular as they may be. The second criteria that we used to shape this budget, about making decisions, about which instructional material were essential to support teaching and learning. We have heard over and over again about achieving a zero increase budget. Our budget is need based. This slide
shows that we are asking ourselves to meet high community expectations with fewer resources. We are continuing to make concessions, for example, we continue to use text books until they are no longer in print and cannot be replaced. Many are ten or more years old. Students are coming to school with more technology at home than they have in our schools. We are not buying library books except in the high school, even though everyone here tonight knows the value of a library book in the hands of a child. Our third criteria that we used to shape this budget was to provide funds to meet student program needs required under federal and stated special education legislation. The Avon Board of Education did not create these mandates, but it does have a legal obligation to ensure that every child, regardless of their learning needs, receives the education that is appropriate for their needs. We are not the kind of community that will short
change or ship off our most needy children. Who in this audience that a child with multiple handicaps is not entitled to a safe and appropriate ride to school? Who in this audience would deny a child with Down Syndrome the opportunity to sit beside his neighbor in his home school? Who in this community would deny an appropriate education to a child with learning disabilities? Yes, these programs are expensive and we have and will continue to work hard to control these costs and programs in the district and other cost saving measures with other districts. The reduction of paraprofessionals and core personnel will be possible after a careful analysis and review of each paraprofessional’s assignment. Each child will continue to receive the support services they need based on their individual education plan. The individual programs will not be compromised by this reduction. Meeting our employment and contractual obligations also
guided our budget discussions. We know that almost 80% of our budget supports the cost of salaries and benefits for the almost 500 employees in the district. We are in discussions with our employee organizations about minimizing the impact of these salary increases on our budget. (inaudible) While this amount is small to the total in relation to our total budget increase, we thank them sincerely for their willingness to contribute to the solution. While still in the process of being negotiated, it is the intention of the Board of Ed that the new Superintendent’s total compensation package will be no greater than Dr. Kisiel’s total compensation package this year. Interestingly, if all employees forego their wage increase next year, it would come out to approximately a 1% reduction in the proposed budget. The Board has an obligation under the law to provide health insurance for their employees. Over the last several years,
we have been able to successfully negotiate contracts with greater employee contributions to help with insurance. Employees currently contribute between 14% and 20% of the cost for the plan. As John mentioned, the Town and the Board of Ed are self insured, similar to what the Town has done every several years in the past, last spring, the Board and the Town went out to bid for its health insurance administrator. After extensive and sometimes volatile discussions, in order to save potentially $300,000 over two years, the Board of Ed and the Town Council voted to change its health insurance administrator from Anthem to Cigna. It was not a popular decision with many of our employees, but as unpopular as it was, it represented the Board and Town Council’s efforts to be responsive to the current fiscal conditions. If you are a parent, you probably heard stories about custodians removing light bulbs in the classrooms and how cold the buildings were
this winter. The stories are all true. We are continuously making efforts to reduce our utility costs. It is amazing the savings we realized in energy consumption by removing one light bulb from a ceiling lamp. We have saved money this year by turning the heat down, which has helped us manage our budget shortfall. We are appreciative of the community support from both replacing of the boiler at Roaring Brook School with high efficiency heating units last summer and the upcoming replacement of the HVAC unit to Avon Middle School this summer. The projected energy savings are reflected in our natural gas account budget remaining almost flat for next year. The increase in the electricity account is primarily the result of a significant increase in the use of computers and other technology at the high school. We are continuously looking for ways to reduce costs. As a joint committee of school and Town personnel that meet regularly to
look for ways that we can work together better. Under Connecticut State Statute, we are required to provide transportation to school because children have a right to reach school safely. High school students who choose to drive to school and parents who prefer to drive their children to school help control our costs for transportation since the 21 buses that we contract with Datco could not accommodate all of the student enrolled in the district in the current three waves and start times. The 2009/2010 budget reflects the results of our recent bidding process. We received three bids from three companies last fall. The administration is still talking with Datco, who is the low bidder about possibilities of how to reduce these costs even further. The Board approaches cost reductions or savings by cooperating with other school districts, the Town and through its own initiatives. Through collaborative purchasing or bidding with ten neighboring
school districts or the 39 school districts in Hartford county, we are able to reduce our costs for supplies, equipment purchases, copier services and paper, special education programs, environmental studies, and to a limited extent, out of district special education transportation. As John mentioned, our cooperative efforts with the Town help reduce our costs for fuel, truck maintenance, athletic field maintenance and preparation and health insurance. Our efforts to reduce the number of light bulbs in use in our schools as well as the reduction of the temperature in our schools will result in a net savings in electrical and heating costs. Our thorough bid process for employee benefits and other purchases allows us to control cost increases. We applied savings for our contract with AT&T to reduce our telecommunications costs. The Board’s plan to redistrict students from Roaring Brook to Pine Grove School, as unpopular as it is with some
families, will allow us to reduce between 2 ½ and 3 teachers. Over the last five or six years, a reorganization and reduction of district administration and reduction of other personnel and programs were necessary to meet the approved Town budgets. This slide presents a lot of information about student enrollment, achievement, pupil cost and district administrators and the strategic school profiles on the State Department of Education website. We hope that you take the time to study it. Our community has high expectations for our schools and our children. Residents expect these results and they expect a coherent curriculum aligned from one grade to the next to continue to achieve these results. When you compare student achievement results against the cost per pupil in each district, the data is telling us that we are getting excellent results with fewer dollars. The challenge before us is this, when we continue to stay at this level of
student achievement, as we continue to reduce people, program and services. Before we leave this slide, I would like to highlight two things. One is that if you look and calculate the number of students per administrator, we already have the highest, that means the least number of administrators, based on our student population, and that is prior to reducing one administrator next year. In addition, each of these districts even though they are smaller than us, have either an assistant superintendent or a director of curriculum, whose primary focus is to ensure a coherent curriculum for all student throughout their K-12 years. This is the latest comparative per student cost data available through the State Department of Education. As I mentioned, we continue to get great results with fewer dollars each year. In 2002/2003, Avon spent almost the most per student as compared to our surrounding Towns. In 2006, Avon spent the least of all of
these Towns. I personally believe the win win would be for Avon to be in the middle of the pack. It will likely take a few years for us to get there. So, just as a summary, our proposed operating budget reflects a 3% increase over this year. I would like to thank you very much for listening and I will be happy to answer any questions later on. After tonight, do not hesitate to contact myself, any other Board of Ed member, Dr. Kisiel or any of our administrators with any questions or concerns about our proposed budget or anything to do with our schools. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison presents Board of Finance overview
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, Peggy, as always, an excellent presentation. There are still some seats up front if you would like to come here. For those of you who arrived after I said it the last time, please turn off cell phones or switch them to vibrate or something so we do not interrupt speakers. There will be one more slide presentation, so we would like to leave off the lights. Thank you. Most of you probably know, but for the benefit of those of you who are new to Town, you may wonder what exactly is it that the Board of Finance is supposed to do. Well, the short answer is one word, finance. We are supposed to come up with ways to find the money to finance these budget presentations and the various programs and policies and personnel that they seek. That is set up by law. It is a kind of a checks and balances. The Board of Education and the Town Council do have the legal authority to make policies and set programs and hire people and so forth, but they do not have
the authority to actually impose and raise the taxes to pay for those programs. The way that the Board of Finance system works in Connecticut and other New England states, our Board has the authority to raise taxes, but we do not set policies, particularly for the Board of Education, we cannot direct them how they should spend their money. You, as the taxpayer, we as the Board of Finance cannot say to the Board of Education, you should hire more teachers or add this program or cut back that program. All we collectively can do is recommend a lump sum. Then the Board of Education then has complete discretion to move funds around within that overall appropriation. On the Town’s side, we do have some authority to do line item changes. We could, for example, say eliminate a dump truck, but we don’t traditionally. What we do, even though we have the authority, if we are going to recommend some downward adjustment in the Town’s
budget, we might say, here is the dollar amount we are looking for. Please see where you can find it, although we could cut specific items if we chose to, but we don’t do it that way. But, that is what we do. We have to find the money to pay for all of these programs that you heard tonight. What I would like to do tonight is talk, as I mentioned earlier about the show me the money. Where do we get it? How do we raise it? Who contributes it? So, that is what we will be talking about tonight and the balancing role that we do in figuring out how much we can realistically ask people to finance is the balance between the services that the Town provides or the services that you would like it to provide, and the taxes that you are willing to turn over to the Town to pay for those services. That is a very delicate balancing point. There is absolutely no computer program that we can buy that will tell us precisely where it
is. To learn how to do that, we really need to hear from you, which we do through the comments you will be making tonight and through the e-mails that you sent us, through conversations that we have with people just because we all live in the Town too. One thing I think we sometimes lose sight of in the heat of the moment. If you look at the Federal budget and how Congress spends the money in taxes, none of use in this room really has much more than a zilch opportunity to influence the federal budget. Similarly with the State budget, we really don’t have any ability to say put this back in the state budget or take that out. Here in Avon, however, and the other Towns in the State, you have the opportunity to say how much you would like to pay in taxes. You don’t have that at the state and federal level. So, it’s a very important distinction. I think that it is a very important power and authority that you have as a
taxpayer in the Town. it is somewhat frustrating to all of us that the budget turnouts generally being 30%-35% of the voters when it is such an important questions, but I would like to see it much higher, but, nonetheless, however many of you turn out, you can decide, you can tell us, this is how much we want to pay in taxes, not a penny more. So, use that power wisely. And that is why we are here tonight, to get some ideas from you on what we should be doing this year. Okay. Next slide please. You have seen the requested budgets. I don’t really need to spend too much time on that. Just the one bottom line there, the overall spending increase for all of the accounts is about $970,000. Much much lower than anything we have had in previous years, certainly since I have been on the Board if Finance, and that is a spending increase of 1.38%. Again, significantly lower than anything any of us has ever seen, so, it clearly
reflects an economic reality that is going on out there. And I think that the reason for that is really sound. Avon is not immune to what is happening out in the rest of the State and in the rest of the Country. We may be a little bit better off than many of our surrounding Towns, and other Towns in the State, but we are facing challenges too. We know that people are losing jobs. We know, just for example, if you read the Hartford Courant, we know that two of the big insurance companies that employee many people in Avon, the Pheonix and the Hartford Life, according to the stories in the press, are facing challenges and maybe possible acquisitions or sell offs of some of their business that could affect a lot of people in Avon with jobs. The New York Times, it doesn’t directly affect Avon, but they have just proposed a massive salary reduction, mandatory salary reductions last month. So, everybody is hurting and so are we in Avon.
So, anyway, that is what we are looking at. We have to figure out, is there, not just an ability to pay that extra $975,000, but is there a willingness to pay that. You will be learning more about that tonight. Peggy. So, these are the questions that we are going to address for you tonight. How do we raise revenues as a Town in Connecticut? How did we do with that system in the current fiscal year? Are we going to finish with a deficit or not? How will we raise the money and what are the options for us to come up with that extra $975,000, a total of 71 point something million? A lot of your are concerned about the revaluation and you want to know what that has affected you and we have a way that you could find that out very simply. And, what will be the tax impact when you combine the revaluation and these budget requests. So, that is the outline of what we are going to cover. A principle question is, how
does a Town such as Avon raise its revenues. State law spells it out and it is highly restrictive. The first way is, if you remember, we have no ability to impose an income tax. Those of you like me, who have moved here from New York or lived in New York know cities in New York have an income tax. We lived in Ohio for awhile and every city in Town had an income tax. State law does not allow Avon to have an income tax. It does not allow us to have sales tax. Every now and then, there are proposals made that Towns that are in the vicinity of a shopping area and they get the traffic impact on that, we should let Towns share the sales tax collected from the shopping center, but to this point at least, there is no ability to impose a Town sales tax. Finally, we are not allowed to put taxes on the vices, tobacco, alcohol, we can’t put a tax on gasoline. We have that Resident’s Inn, but we can’t have a hotel tax in
Avon. So, you see, the State has really taken away from Connecticut towns a lot of options that a lot of towns in other States have. Alright, so, if these are things that we cannot do, what’s left for us? And, the simple answer is, not much. We really have two sources of income. Property taxes and certain assessments that go with that and what I call, everything else, meaning non-property taxes, but not income sales, etc. These would be licenses, fees, and that sort of thing, and I will give you some illustrations and tell you how that works for us in just a moment. But, that are the two income streams that we have, property tax and the non-property tax. Now, let’s talk about the property tax. In the current fiscal year, there is about a $70 million total budget, $60 million of that came from the property tax. That’s about 85 almost 86% of the Town’s income. So, on a $70 million budget, $60
million came from the property tax. The other $10 million came from the so called other non-property tax sources. That is about 14% of our revenues. Peggy. Now, John Carlson alluded to some of the challenges we had for the current fiscal year, the snow and ice costs and the salt removal. Most of the 19 snowstorms that John mentioned occurred on weekends, so we had to pay overtime to our crews, so there was some increase in cost there. The hydrant rentals that John talked about, which substantially increased costs to the Town. On the Board of Education side, they face challenges because of the State mandates that any time a family moves into Avon with a special needs child, they have to pay for that, so that is a challenge that they face. Peggy. So, how did we do? The answer is, pretty good. We have not completed the third quarter yet, so we have, that will close tomorrow, but in general, you can see there, the
different categories, the property tax portion, we budgeted $60,436,000. That is a slightly higher figure than the one you saw the previous page. The reason for that is a technical term called the levy, and the levy includes the property taxes which was $60 million and also certain other things related to it. For example, if the people are late with payments, there are certain penalties and interest, that’s included in that category. But, the property tax, we budgeted $60,436,000 and we are just about that. The second half property tax came in just about on schedule, however, a little bit of a cloud. There was a noticeable increase in people who asked to pay their second half taxes in installments. It is a little higher than what we usually see. I don’t know what that means for next year, but, a little cloud in the sky. So, the next category is intergovernmental. That is basically grants for the state or
federal government. There, too, you see, we are about on budget for that. We should be okay there. Licenses, fees and permits, they are down. If you look at the bottom of the page, there, it is about $162,000 down. A lot of that is from the building permits because there really have not been the request for them. People are just aren’t building stuff these days, some renovations, but no new structures, so our licenses, fees and permits, budgeted revenues, up to this point at least, below budget. Charges for current services, this would be things like landfill fees, if there is a traffic accident, we need copies of accident reports, you pay to get that, animal control, the pound, things of that sort. They are pretty much on target. Other local revenues, this was a big hit, this is primarily interest in our investments. When we get that first half tax payment during the summer, we don’t need to spend it all at
once, so we can park it in an interest baring account. In some years, we do a considerable amount of interest income, but with the Feds cutting rates, we are not raising a lot of interest, so you can see, interest income is down about $461,000, which is an ouch figure. Other financing sources, this is somewhat narrowly focused, it is a plan use of surplus in certain cases, and that has not changed among the anticipated. Another big drop off is in our conveyance tax revenues. Not only are people not taking out permits to build new, they are just not selling as many existing structures as we had. And when you do sell one, there is a conveyance tax, but if there are not sales, no conveyances, no revenue. So, you can see, we are about $990,000 below what we anticipated from our revenue streams. We still have four months or so to go in the fiscal year. Generally in Avon, we don’t finish with a deficit. We look at our friends at
the state level and see that they are anticipating a deficit in the current year, over one billion dollars over the state budget and they are talking about 6-8 billion dollars in deficit in the next two year budget that they are working on now. We do not anticipate being in a deficit situation. If we do, however, we do have, that John Carlson eluded to, we do have some unreserved funds so we will be able to cover it, but usually by the end of the fiscal year, we have some ability to move funds around whether it be from the snow removal account because it was over budget but there are other things that are under, so usually we can move funds around and as of tonight, March 30th, we are doing everything we can, both the Town and the schools have put in some cost saving measures, so that without anticipating, we are not planning to have a deficit, but if we do, we think it will be easily manageable, but you never know. Stranger things have happened, but
that is where we are, so the budget system and the numbers we used for the last fiscal year are basically, I think, going to work for us, even with the economy problems that we have. Peggy. Now, some of the challenges going into the next one, and again, John and Peggy had eluded to these, we are not anticipating much of a jump up in conveyances of properties, so we don’t see that revenue stream providing much. We have been told that conveyance tax, they keep extending it for two years at a time, it’s supposed to expire this June 30th, the word that we were getting from Hartford is that it will be extended, but it will not bring in the revenue that it brought in in the past, so that will be a challenge for us, fewer dollars coming from the conveyance tax. We don’t anticipate the Feds jumping up interest rates very soon, so interest revenue stream will be considerably down next year and as I said, the building permit revenue.
So, we don’t really see any big savior in terms of grants and that, again, we don’t know specifically the anticipation in the education cost sharing grant. The Governor has said that will not be reduced from the current level. Some other grants, may be however. Avon, because it is generally viewed to be a more prosperous community than some, does not get as much grant income, so, it is a good news bad news thing, we can’t lose as much if we are not getting as much, but that will be out there as a challenge as well. Peggy. Alright, now let’s look at the budget requests that are on the table tonight, that gets us to about $71,500,000. If the Board of Finance were to recommend those budgets and if the voters were to approve them, how do we come up with the money to finance them? Well, because of the fall off of some of these revenue streams, a bigger chunk has to go on the property tax portion of it, sorry, there
is just no way we can avoid that, we don’t have the other revenue streams, so we would have to go up on the current year’s budget at $60.4 million in the property tax up to $62.1 million. That is an increase of about $1,700,000, big jump. Grants are down a little bit, we project, licenses and fees are down a little bit, charges for current services, a slight increase, John mentioned there were certain fee increases and so forth, but not enough to really make a big difference, but a little bit of a jump there. Increased income, we are projecting less than what we budgeted this year because of the reality of what the Fed is doing and other financing sources, again, it dropped there. So, to get to that $71.5 million, we would have to shift more of that funding to the property tax. Okay, let’s look at the property tax. That has 6 separate categories, two of them directly affect all of us, the rest do indirectly. In the current
fiscal year budget, almost, I’m sorry, this is the projected budget, we will have to get almost 66% of our revenue from the single family homes. That is a very big chunk. In the condos, we look for almost 13%. Now, if you look on the third line from the top there in the headline, you see that to get to the $71 million that has been requested, we would have to get 86.9% of that from those two categories from the property tax, so let’s round it to 87%. If you add up the 65% that comes from the single homes and the 12 point whatever percent from the condos, what that means is that the single family home category, when you take 66% of the 87%, the single family homes category is going to provide 57% of all of our income. When you get into condos those two categories combined, single family homes and condos, will have to contribute 68.5% of our dollars that is a little over two thirds of our revenue. So, that is going to really affect you,
more so perhaps than some of you would like. The other categories, you can see, 11% from commercial, motor vehicles, that is actually down a little bit and we will talk about that in a moment, personal property, it is not a big chunk of it, and the industrial is not a big chunk, so we really look to the condos and the single family homes, two out of every three dollars that we will have to raise. Okay, the non-property tax side will be about 13% in the upcoming budget. The grants, about 5% and the others you can see there, it is not a lot from the other sources. Just looking at the comparison for the year to year, the property tax portion goes to 85.7 to 86.9, so it is going up more than a full point, which is going to show up with the checks you have to write to the Town, it is about a 1.2% increase with a portion coming from the property tax. Now, how do we use these dollars in the next budget? We are going to show that two different ways on
two different slides. This first one is by the budget categories that show up in those summaries, Town operating, school operating, debt service, sewers, and I forget, capital improvement. And you can see there that that biggest single chunk of it, almost $45 million is school operating budget. The Town operating budget increases, you can see over the last five years at a slow rate, but it is still going on. Most of that, everybody knows, it’s no secret, it is driven by salaries and benefits. Now, if you look at the next page, next slide, where we do it by functions, you can see that in the current budget and the one proposed as requested tonight, when you throw in the school side of it, the principle and interest costs on debt service and capital improvement, about 70% of our spending of the budget is school related, not just the operating budget, but the debt service. We will be going out this fall for the $24 millions in bonds for the
high school expansion, so when you put all of this together, it is about 70% of our spending is school based. How do we figure out the mill rate? There are a couple of different things. The first part, the shaded area tells you the secret formula. Now you will all be dangerous after tonight, you will know how we do this. Let’s start with this line. The current fiscal year, one of the earlier slides, the $60 million figure there, that is the 6 categories that I talked about, condos, private homes, automobiles and so forth, and in the current budget year, to get to the $70 million, we had to get $60 million from the property tax, so you get that, you start with the amount of money you need, you divide it by the old grand list, because that was the one that was in effect for that budget year. Then when you get that result, you divide that by 1,000 and that produces the mill rate you need to raise that $60 million. The current mill
rate is 26.53. So, that is how we do it. You can do it yourselves if you want to play around with it, but that’s the formula. Now, let’s look at the new grand list. We start with, we just want to see what we would need if we are going to have the same level of funding before we talk about spending increases. Because of the number of decimal points and so forth, you could not match precisely the $60,008,000, but after doing all of the numbers, the closest things that will come out for comparison purposes is $60,006,000, which matches the current amount of money that the property tax raised this year, but we have a new grand list. So, you go through the same steps. You divide the money you would need by the new grand list, divide or multiply that result by 1,000 and you get the new base mill rate, 22.95. That’s the mill rate that would be in effect if there were to be a zero spending increase budget. That would,
within a couple dollars, as I said you can go so many decimal points, but 22.95% mill rate on the new grand list would bring us just about the same amount of money that was raised by the property tax in the current year. So, 22.95 is our base number. If we are going to be talking about tax increases, there would be increases above 22.95. So, that is how we do that. This year, the budgets again, if we recommend them as they exist tonight and you approve them as they exist tonight, we would have to raise from the property tax$61,798,000, so, how would we get that? You go through the formula. You take the amount of money you need, divide it by the new grant list, the $2.6 million grand list, and then you multiply that result by 1,000, so again, if the Board of Finance were to recommend the requested budgets and if you were to approve them, the new mill rate would be 23.64 and in percentage terms that’s a 2.98% increase in the tax rate.
Now, notice I am not saying in your taxes, but in your tax rate. There is a little more to this than what we have so far, but that is what the new mill rate would have to be to be a 2.98% increase in the rate over the comparable number for the current fiscal year, so again, the charts that you have seen on the budgets there, I think it’s about a 1.38% overall spending increase. To finance a 1.38% increase in spending, we would need a tax increase rate increase of 2.98% and there is a big change. It was about three years or so ago, we could always pick up some of the slack because of the growth of the grand list. Okay Peggy. But, in the last fiscal years, the name of the game changed because the grand list has not been growing, and in each of those years, the rate of growth in the grand list was less than the amount of the tax increase, so we can no longer ride on the benefit we had for many years there in the 90’s and this decade when
the grand list was growing so much it could fund a good chunk of our increases in spending. Now, we have to pay a higher tax rate increase to pay for a lower amount of spending increase, just to change the rules. Peggy. This one shows you the comparison there, you can see going back to fiscal 05/06, that was the last year, really, that the spending increase and the grand list and mill rate were beneficial for us and it has been changing each year for the past years. This year it looks a little distorted because of the reval, as I explained, when you run the comparisons, the increase in the grand list will not be enough to cover the 2.98% tax increase that we have to have. Peggy. Let’s look now at the new grand list that affects you, and I am going to tell you how to calculate you difference from year to year, so have a pencil ready for when we get there. You can see, the residential value of the grand list went up about 18%, you can
read the numbers, condos 17, overall combined, the grand list went up about 15%. Now let’s turn to the next one. This shows whether the budget was split, grand list to grand list. In some years, back in the 90’s there, when we have had a couple years in the early 90’s when we had reval, and it made a substantial adjustment between the residential and the condos and the commercials. This year, there is very little change overall. The residential went up a little bit compared to what they are as a percentage of the grand list, new grand list and old, condos almost the same, commercial the same, industrial the same, motor vehicles went down, and I will talk about this because that could have some positive tax impacts for some of you, but overall, although the overall grand list did go up by 15%, the shifts among categories weren’t very significant so we are not going to see a situation where neither the residential and the condos
have to pick up a much bigger chunk nor are we going to see a big switch to the resident to the commercial or the industrial, so it will be just about the same as it was. That is going to be good news for some of you, but that’s the breakdown. Okay Peggy, next one. Now, let’s talk about tax impact and this is where I will give you some numbers in a moment and we are also going to give you a website where you can get your own personal information. We are using the average figure under the old grand list and the new one and Harry DerAsadourian tells me that the average home price under the new grand list in Avon is $405,000. You assess that at 70% so the assessed value of that house would be $283,000. Cars, you can see, have gone down maybe because people are not buying cars, so that’s that. So, the total of the 70% on the house plus the cars on the new grand list on the average house faces a taxable amount of $303,000.
If you apply that new mill rate that I suggested that we would need of 23.64, you could see that the taxes would be $7,100 compared to $6,900, so it is about a $235 tax increase or 3.30% and that is the tax and not the tax rate, that’s why I said before that you can’t, don’t confuse the tax rate with the actual tax we pay. So, it doesn’t look like a lot at first, but as they say, there is more and we will get to that in just a moment, but that is the average. Very few of you are in that average category, so I am going to tell you how you pin in down to yourself. Don’t worry about all of that puke green, as the way it has been described to me, color. Here is the trick. At the top of the page, there is the Town of Avon assessor’s website. You can also reach it through the Town website that is shown at the bottom of the page, but you can skip that and go directly to the Avon assessor website. Now, why
would you want to do that? Okay, when you do that, this is the page that will show up. You can find your property two ways. By property address or by owner name, and you can do this for your neighbors is your nosey too. It’s all public information. If you want to do it by property address, there are 26 letters, go to the letter for your street then when you get into the C’s or D’s or whatever it is, scroll down to your own particular street and when you get down to your own particular street, scroll down to your house number. If you do it by name, you can follow the same process. Now, when you do that, what will you see? This is something neat that we created just for the purposes of this. This is a property card. The person who prepared this slide, I asked her to take a card for someone who is one of the elected officials on one of the three Boards, pick is at random, and block out the name and address,
although you can see it if you walk into the Assessor’s office. Now, when you get to the card, this is a virtual card. This is what is neat about computers. If you physically walked in to the Assessor’s office and asked to see the card for your property, you won’t see the stuff that is down here, that I am going to talk about, but this is what you are really interested in. So, we have created this and is available to you only on the website, at no charge. So, let’s look at this. The stuff on the left side of the card is the current year, so whatever this particular property is, you can see the current year’s assessment for the house and the cars, total assessment, you see the 26.5 which is the current assessment, you see what that piece of property paid on the house, what they paid on the cars and the total tax payment. Then you go over to the right side, you get the same information on the new grand list with
the budget requests as they are on the table tonight, so for example, this piece of property lucks out because the house portion went up and the person would pay an extra $161 with the new budget, however, the cars went down by a significant amount because this person did not buy any new cars in the last year, so this lucky person, even if the budget is approved as is, will pay $306 less in taxes. Now, this is not going to work for everybody. Some of you will get a big chunk, but you can do this yourselves. Go to this site via Avonasserssor.com. You can play with your property, or you can look up the person across the street. You can also if you want to figure out what changed the reval had on you before you get into any budget related tax increases. You could do that too. Take these numbers, the new real estate and the cars and the total, and instead of, this is not set up for mathematical problems, it is just, you can multiply the numbers
there, the new assessments by, this you will want to write down, .02295. That’s the mill rate I told you that is that base that is the direct comparison if you are going to be paying the same amount of taxes roughly as you do in the current year, that would be the mill rate you use. So, you can multiply it by that figure, .02295 on these values in the left hand column there and then you will know what your tax change would be because of the mill rate, the grand list change. Some of you will go up. Generally speaking, if your house went up less than the average increase in the residential, the average, which was one of my earlier slides, I think was 18 point something percent. Generally, if your value went up less than that, you will probably do okay, if your value went up over that, you will see an increase, although you may benefit from the cars. This point here that I showed you, showed an increase in the house but the cars more than
offset it, so the key thing to remember in all of this is that it is very easy to get to and you can do it for anybody in Town, you are going to have a lot of fun playing with it. I think you might like to see what your neighbors do, but that will help you understand because there is a lot of, you are going to get these urban legends that I have already seen in some of the e-mails that I have been getting, that the reval change is going to boost everybody’s taxes by a huge amount. There might be a few, if you bought a couple of new Bentleys in the last year or two, you might see a big jump, but this is here. It is for your use and it is very meek. Harry DerAsadourian and this group put it together. One of the people who helped in set this up is somebody named Hal and those of you of a certain age will remember the movie 2001 Space Odyssey. When Harry said that he asked Hal to do this, I got a little nervous about that, but he did a good
job. So, you have got this all on this, go to the website and work your way through to your property and then you will see and you can make a direct comparison for each category, the current year and what you would pay if the budgets are recommended and approved as submitted. So, that should take a lot of the agony we go through every year about worrying. You will recall in 04/05 the last time that we had to deal with a reval, that was the first time that we had to go to three referendums and it was because a lot of people were concerned that the reval jumped up their taxes separately from any budget increase, but here you can figure it out for yourselves, so that is a great thing and thank Hal for putting this together. Peggy. Okay, just some comparison, half of you will like the left column and half of you will like the right column better, but we put both in. The left hand column shows what they call the equalized mill rate. It is for the 2007
year because of the revals and we can’t get a direct comparisons yet, but as you can see, Avon has the lowest equalized mill rate. Many of you say, great. The other one the tax levy per capita shows, we may be the lowest in the equalized mill rate, but per capita, when you divide the amount of money we have to pay by the population, we are about the highest. I don’t know if either of these makes a hill of beans difference in anything because most of this is about how big is the check I have to write, but people like to see this so we put both columns in and you can complain about either or both or whatever. We will need to increase the mill rate by 2.98% over that base and the spending increase is 1.38%. To summarize then, I repeat what I just said, and that’s what we need. Finally, what the next steps are, the public hearing which is what we are doing right now, so we will get to that in just a minutes, and the workshop
tomorrow evening, this is where, under the Charter, our Board is to confer after the public hearing with the other two Boards and we have got to figure out what people are telling us, not just here tonight, but through e-mail, conversations around Town. You have heard me tell every year, and it has changed, I used to comment that I would be caught in the frozen food section at Stop and Shop; that is shifting now to the deli line for some reason, I am waiting in the deli line and people come up and tell me what they think about taxes, there is a lot of bologna on both parts of that. Anyway, that is the situation on how we raise the money and how much we have to raise, big chunk of that, bigger than last year’s coming from the property tax and homes. We will now get into the public comment section. I am going to ask that the rest of the Board of Finance members to come up here. We have two locations, there is a microphone with a lectern up here in
the front and I think there is, yeah, there is one in the back. What we will do is that we will ask that you raise your hand. This is one of the biggest crowds we have had, so I would ask that you keep your remarks to about three minutes. I will remind you all when you are getting there. We ask that you don’t speak a second time until everyone had had a turn to speak once. Tell us your name and address and it would be helpful as John Carlson mentioned if you want to suggest or complain about a particular budget reduction, that’s fine, but maybe come up with a suggestion if there is something else. The e-mails that I am getting are following a pattern. People who may want to keep the school budget where it is are very quick to volunteer to cut Town expenses, close the library more days or pave fewer miles of streets, and people on the other side are very quick to say well, let’s eliminate some school programs. That’s fine if you want to say that, but it would really be
helpful if you make some constructive suggestions on what you think we should be doing this year, recognizing that, although we do have, as John said, a very high tax collection rate, as I mentioned earlier about people wanting to (inaudible), we don’t know if we will be in as good shape in the fall. We will have to keep some surplus for that purpose, just in case if there is any need there to use it, so we will go as long as we have to. Please stated your name and address and are you ready to speak? Fine, there is already someone up there, so tell us who you are and we will go from there, and about three minutes roughly.
Thomas Harrison calls upon the audience for questions and comments on the Town Council, Board of Finance and Board of Education budgets
J. McIssac, 52 Northington Drive: As was already said, Avon has the lowest per pupil for education cost in the region. The last two things that we ought to be cutting from the budget are public safety and education. Just a cursory glance at the proposed budget shows possibly $1.2 million for parks and recreation and $1.3 million for the library, both are increased over last year. I am not against either of those two programs, but, in my mind, both of those have a lower priority than education and if you were to simply to cut 50% out of those two, you would have a completely neutral budget. Again, I am not against those programs by any means, but we have to set things in proper priority. For instance, what is the cost of even having this building open? We can take
programs that we run currently here, and make them pay to play and run them after school in open classrooms and save quite a bit of money right there. We could even consider more drastic things if we are really going to be cutting things to the bone and consider even leasing some of the properties such as this one to a commercial entity. They would pay a tax and turn a profit or even sell the property. Again, we have already cut education to the bone and that is really one of those important things, probably the most important things besides public safety in the entire budget. There is really no room to cut education anymore. We ought to be looking at other things. There is enough room and other line items to completely have a neutral budget.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you. You are welcome to do that, but let me assure you it makes absolutely no difference to us. We don’t make, as my good friend Tom Gugliotti says every year, we don’t make our decisions on the applause meter. So, applause, boos or hisses don’t influence us, they just take a little bit of time, anyway, somebody else? Yes, right here.
Elaine Nord, 16 Oak Bluff: Good evening. I have three kids, two of them are in college now and one is at the high school. I am the co-chair along with Laurie Stanzik and Laurie Pecor of the Community of Concern, a parents group. We are here tonight in concern for our students and our community. With the proposed 3% increase, the Board of Ed has eliminated the health curriculum at the high school, has reduced the number of the health staff throughout the lower schools and our police department have cut the DARE program. Tonight, I wondered also why we have removed an officer from the regional drug task force and have placed him back on patrol. Our Avon stats, based on the last Board of Education survey of Avon High School student, 2006, said the following:
60% of AHS students have been drinking in the last month. Their first drink was at 13. Students reported consuming alcohol for an average of 5 days out of every month. Typically drinks per sitting, three, although males and upper classman averaged more. Over half reported being drunk during the last month. About 1/3 have tried smoking marijuana. 14% of students have abused painkillers such as OxyCodine and 45% of students claim that at least a few of their close friends have gone to hospitals, emergency departments for alcohol or drug abuse. The Center for Disease Control list the following as consequences for underage drinking: school problems; memory problems; absenteeism; fighting; legal problems such as arrest for DUI, assault and underage drinking; unprotected sexual activity, sexual assault and rape; disruption of their normal brain growth and changes that may have lifelong affects; higher suicide rates; alcohol related
car crashes and other unintentional injuries like falls and drowning and alcohol poisoning or abuse of other drugs. At a recent forum, Is 21 the Answer, at the Farmington High School. All of the college representative felt that there is a culture of dangerous binge drinking. While it is not clear that they all felt that the drinking age should be changed, it was unanimous that a dialogue needs to take place since there are 1,700 college students per year that die from alcohol related accidents and poisoning. It was said that 77% of incoming freshmen in college drank while they were in high school. All of the panel members feel that parents should talk to their children frequently about personal responsibility to this issue and that local health education should focus on teaching strategies that will help students to avoid alcohol and binge drinking.
Thomas Harrison: You have about a minute or a little under.
Elaine Nord: Okay. I will be concluding shortly. In contemplating the Board of Ed and Town budget strategy, we ask, is this the right time to end health education classes at Avon High School? Is this the right time to cut back on the staff on the younger schools? Is this the right time for the Avon Police Department to end the tradition of the DARE programming? Many of us will argue that the program should be updated and enhanced. As parents, we have a right to know how our schools will respond without the person needed to address prevention, related injuries and mental health issues caused by use of substances. How do Town officials consider the potential community impact from substance abuse. We hope that the Board of Finance will refuse to accept
these program cuts as presented by the Board of Ed and the Police Department. And to provide a solution to the problem, we have asked that grant writing be considered and to have some type of position at the high school and I just want to mention that the DARE program does cost for materials, $6,000 and the officer is between $15,000 and $21,000 and I don’t believe that the Rotary Club will be able to fund that entire amount. Thank you very much.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you very much. Okay, next? Well, okay, you can use this one in the front.
Justin Spalla, 17 Oxbow Drive: It looks like you did a good job, but I have some comments about the drugs and alcohol. That seems to be like a parent issue. As far as comparing ourselves to the schools and other schools, well, I work at Avon Old Farms school, which is considered a very popular, very well known and educated school. Well, they didn’t increase their budget because the stock market took a large chunk of their revenue, they decreased their revenue by $2 million and still keeping the same. So, as far as you, the only reason I see you doing this is because of the teacher unions and unions have to deal with that. As far as like you have to increase, you have to do drugs, you have to all this other stuff, how did they decrease and we keep on increasing? Just because we can say we can raise taxes, but they can’t, they can’t raise taxes and they can’t do all of these other revenue streams. Ours is less and theirs is more and they are still doing better.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, sir. Okay, next? Yes, to my right side, yes, you just put your hand up.
Dan Schwartz, 34 Oakengates: We have two kids at Pine Grove and one will be going into Pine Grove in another two years. We moved to this Town because of the schools and while I can’t say that I am particularly happy with the cuts, we have had to suffer through in this next proposed budget, a cut of the school librarian. The Pine Grove School will no longer have a librarian, which is shocking to me. We will have a reduction in our health program and I can’t say that I am happy, but during this time of shared sacrifice, it is something that I am willing to live with. I want to commend the school and the Board of Finance with coming up with a budget that reflects the difficult times that we are in. While I was sitting there, I went on the internet and I have
got one of those Blackberries, I am one of those techies here and I looked up the taxes and for a 20% increase in my assessment, I was particularly worried about our taxes, but I found out overall, we are going to go up about $150, so, for all of that worry, the work that you guys did to keep our rates down, it will pay off in the end, so thank you and I will support the increase that is proposed.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, Dan. Okay, yes.
Diane Dumais, 24 Zachary Drive: My key thing is that I have a question, if I am understanding the bottom line correctly, on average, if the budget is proposed as stated at this point, the average house will see an increase of $235 per year in taxes.
Thomas Harrison: Not necessarily, because it will depend on the cars. Some years, you will have to look it up yourself.
Diane Dumais: But roughly, it is about $10 per month is what we are talking for the average household right now.
Thomas Harrison: If your figures are in that category, then that would be $235.
Diane Dumais: If there is any discussion beyond this, assuming we are not going to be increasing what has been asked for, anything discussion from this point is talking about a difference of less than $10 per month? Is that right? $20 per month, sorry basic math. Is that right? That’s all I ask. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison: Okay, next. Flo.
Florence Stahl, 2 Sunset Trail: Good evening everybody. In these difficult economic times, people have come to understand the need for government transparency and with it freedom of information. This booklet is the realization of both and our local government cooperated fully. No hassles, no hesitation. Thank you Avon Town Council, Phil Schenck, Bill Vernile, Dr. Kisiel, Peggy Roell, Gary Franzi, and thanks also to their staff. Of course, every year our methodology and questions get a little better as we discover new information, we will share it with you. Now, we did not compile this report as a commentary on the worth of any individual. That was so not our goal. This compensation booklet was published for one reason and one reason only, salaries and
benefits comprise 80% of our annual budget. Tonight, we are talking about a mere 20%. We believe that taken collectively and at a time when the grand list is trending downward, we do not believe that this is sustainable, or to put in another way, it is sustainable but only at the expense of other services. We can already see this effect in reduced library hours, increased fees for many services, canceled brush pickup, reduced educational programs, suspended field trips and limited sports opportunities to name a few and I assure you that the list will grow every year because the level of taxation required to have everything would become so burdensome, it will hurt the community and its businesses. Incomes and investments are shrinking. Parents understandably want a good school system and everyone wants home values to remain high. How can we reconcile these factors? Are we condemned to balancing the budget on the backs of students and people
on fixed incomes because we overspend and over-promise for years? Are we really stuck with compensation agreements that are draining our resources? Are we comfortable asking everyone else to sacrifice while others remain insulated from these pressures? This is not the year to ramp up property taxes, not with revaluation, not with jobs in peril. It may be too late for this year, but starting now, we must ask our Boards to be willing to think out of the box, to take a hard look at inefficiencies, to take on challenges…
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, the moderator will determine. Thank you, we don’t do a dialogue here. Just wind it down. You have a minute or so, Flo.
Florence Stahl: Thank you all for your courtesy. I am about finished. We need to look elsewhere to ease the budget crunch. The traditional way of building a budget goes straight to the taxpayers for added relief of cutting services and programs that define our community. That must change. Thank you very much.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, Flo. Someone else would like to speak? Yes, right here.
Mr. Geller, Lovely Street: I just want to say that personally, I won’t vote for any kind of budget that (inaudible) we should not fool ourselves in difficult times (inaudible).
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, sir. Yes, right here on my left side of the aisle.
Bob Paine, 68 Tamara Circle: Just one suggestion with funding going forward. Interest rates, long term rates, because of the economic problems, I was wondering whether or not there is any change in refunding refinancing some of the existing debt service that we have to a lower rate, considering that we have triple A rating. We might be able to be in an unusually positive position, with some of these things that might cut down on future expenses with debt service.
Thomas Harrison: We can certainly take a look at that.
Bob Paine: The other thing is that as I listen to people, parents speak today, it seems that they wish to shift the responsibility of parenting off to the public. This is, when you are in it, you don’t recognize that you are doing it unless you were not doing it in a previous generation and I think that that is something that you have to think hard about when you complain about a drug problem and when you complain about driving or being killed or severely injured in an automobile accident. We had automobiles and we had alcohol available for a long period of time, but apparently somehow or another, the parenting influence in the culture was strong enough to prevent a lot of those problems. I am not sure, but it may be what children are exposed to as they are growing up today
because of advertising and peer influences and what have you. Whatever it is, it is some big change in the culture and I think we face is as parents, rather than consider the fact that it is the responsibility of the general public to cure these problems. They are really not. But, the other thing is that someone here mentioned an interesting thing about, and that is, leasing property. There are communities around this country that do not own one school building. The school buildings are owned by private firms, they are on the grand list and they pay property taxes, and they sign the school or the Town signs a 20 or 30 year lease. The builder goes out and is able to get financing for that at the drop of a hat because if you walk in with a 30 year lease backed by the payer, which is the Town, where the community is getting this property tax income to pay for that rental fee, it’s amazing what kind of rates and the terms the borrower gets. The other thing that happens is that
the maintenance of the building and the other things are done by private firms because the property owner higher them. They are not union personnel, they are not benefit rich personnel, they are open market personnel. It’s just a thought. I walkout out once before on the high school renovation program because I mentioned that.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, Bob. While he is fixing that, is there someone else? Yes, right here in the front.
Joe Lanzetta, 76 Lofgren Road: Thanks to the guy in the back with the Blackberry. He gave me the idea and I looked too. My total is $600 increase. I don’t know if any of you except to get a raise from your employers. Anybody want to get a raise from their employers? You will be complaining if you don’t right? Well, I think, you know, if you give everybody else a raise, $600 doesn’t seem like a lot. I think that everybody should look before we start giving lots of comments about how much our taxes are. Just go and look and see what it is all about. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison: Somebody from this side here? Yes.
Dottie Magda, 12 Crestwood Drive: Good evening. I have been here since 1960 and I have watched this Town ebb and flow and grow and the one thing that strikes me when I come into these meetings, if you all look around, there are a lot of us with gorgeous silver gray hair. We don’t get that without living long enough to have experience and knowledge. We are a resource. We are here for the Town. We have the experience with raising all of you young ones. Why not see if we, as a volunteer state, and many others volunteer on Boards and education committees and things like that for the Town. See if we can’t put together a collaborative where you could use our years of knowledge experience, patience, to help. You need a librarian? Could there
be such a thing as a volunteer or two or fifteen? The second thing that I want to ask is, as a Town, you have pointed out that on the back of the taxpayers is where the money is coming from. Is there any land left, any place left to court and woo a gentle industrial or retail proposition to relieve us of some money that we are having taken from us that we don’t all necessarily have at this point. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, Dottie.
Linda Merlin, 48 High Gate Drive: Some years I write speeches, I didn’t write a speech tonight, but I did want to read something that I actually cut out last October, written by Thomas Freedman from the New York Times. My parents taught me that paying taxes, well, certainly not fun, was how we pay for the police and the army our public universities and our local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Homes. I like paying taxes, but that might buy civilization. I don’t like paying taxes any more than anyone else in this room. I might not use the word civilization, but I might use the word community, but what we pay in our taxes is what we buy in our community. I ask everyone in this
room to think about what kind of community they really want and what they want Avon to be and to make their decision. I guess now people will look it up to see what this increase will cost them and maybe what the difference between what the Town and the schools are asking for now and what would happen if you decreased it by a certain amount. It is not a huge difference. I think that it is worth it. I hope you will cut as little as possible. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, Linda. All the way in the back.
Jay Spivak, 125 Northgate: I am speaking in favor of the proposed budget. I feel that there is a group in Town that always opposes the initial budget proposal. I approve of many of the arguments. We are facing extremely difficult economic times. We are all trying to find ways to spend less in our own households and I think that the Town needs to continue its initiatives to cooperate with other Towns. Town officials also need to continue to look at each line item to see if there is a more efficient or cost effective manner to accomplish the same services. I am always frustrated when I hear the reasons why people vote against the Town budget so, I am only asking people to educate themselves. If you are concerned about expense or if you have some issue that you
don’t understand, then ask. There are plenty of people to answer those questions. As most of you know, my primary concern is always our children’s education. We all probably agree that what we are leaving our children is an enormous federal debt. We all fear that we are losing jobs overseas. Shouldn’t we at least provide our children with the education and skills and provide them the ability to pay back these debts and keep our jobs in our country. We are fortunate to have good teachers in Avon, so let’s do what we can to keep them here. Given today’s unique financial situation that we face, I request that the Town use some of the Town’s undesignated general fund to offset the effect of the revaluation. The Town has done this in the past and if there is ever a year we need to reduce the tax burden, it would be now. So, Mr. Harrison, I ask that you would consider that.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you. We will certainly look at all of the comments and suggestions that are being made tonight. Thanks.
Juliana Mando, 54 Westmont: This is really a question for Peggy and the Board. With the proposed cuts of teachers, 8.5 positions, what is that going to do to class size? Is that really going to bump up class size much? And especially at the elementary level, I have a big concern about that considering that there is so much full time (inaudible) happening now, and the ability to really deal with a larger classroom, even going up to say 23 or 24, given the type of curriculum we are using now, it really becomes problematic. And, yes, we need more volunteers in the classroom, but I am really concerned that 8.5 is, that’s a huge amount and also the paraprofessionals too. I work in Farmington and I do a lot of Special Ed kids and to see the amount of energy it takes, it
is just incredible and to close, a comment, yes, we have the issue of salary. Don’t forget that Connecticut pays well because we are an expensive State and the State of Connecticut saw fit to raise the salary for teachers to attract the best. To be a teacher here, you had to (inaudible). The Towns were saddled with it. I don’t know if there is ever going to be a way to revolve that. We are stuck with it. Again, I don’t know what else we could do to bring back those teachers who are going to potentially be cut. The health program is very important, so, I don’t know what other possibilities there could be, but that is my concern. Thank you.
Peggy Roell: With the redistricting, it’s between two and a half and three and a half teachers. It depends on how many kids actually move into Town. None of the classes will be up over, are projected to be up over the contractual limits of the teachers contract. It is just more fully utilizing the space. Is it the best alternative? No, but at this time the ways that this Board official can use our resources was one of the things that we considered. But we are monitoring it, the ranges because we don’t know how many kids are actually going to be in the classroom and all of the different classes. As far as paraprofessionals, I mentioned that Special Ed department went through and evaluated or looked at all of the requirements of all of the students
to see how much time we needed, so the paraprofessionals are being fully utilized to what they are required to do without any surplus time. Yes, if affects the kids, but it is, they are getting what is required by law, just not anything additional. Then the other teachers and the health programs and other things, it is a way to try to get to the 3%, it was not easy. The administrators work very very hard and like I said, none of the decisions were easy at all. If you have other suggestions, let us know.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you, Peggy. Yes, right by the microphone back there.
Colleen Donahue, 6 Timothy Way: I have three children. We moved to Avon 15 years ago solely for the school system as most parents and residents here in Avon have. Since that time, I have seen class sizes increase while services and opportunities decrease. Many of those activities are now pay to play. It is time to stop punishing the children of our Town. Obviously we are in a fiscally challenging time. People are living on fixed incomes, decreased incomes or worse, loss of income. Money that has been saved by the parents for college has been wiped out by the stock market. Money is tight for everyone and we all understand that, but decreasing the quality of schools by eliminating programs is not the answer. My son is a freshman in college now. Neither he nor his fellow classmates would have been admitted to the elite universities that they were without the array of activities that were provided, from high school sports, to theater to government to community services to
name a few. Top grades and perfect SATs are a dime a dozen now. You need more. Those alone do not guarantee admissions. With decreased college admissions, the desirability of the Town decreases. When a Town’s desirability decreases, so does the Town’s property values, which is good for no one. The requested Board of Education budget already has undesirable cuts, teachers are cut, class sizes are increased, there are no health classes, no DARE. The full time job of an athletic director has been decreased to half time position. If further cuts are required and student activities are eliminated, then I propose that this facility become a true community center with after school and evening programs for students. It will not replace the sports programs, music or theater programs or clubs that we all had in our high school years, so please, once again, it is time to stop punishing our children. Please accept the
Board of Education’s proposed budget. One more thing, as far as the gentleman said that parenting, that the drugs has to do with parenting, I grew up in Simsbury at a time when there was no DARE. Every year, we had at least one alcohol or drug related fatality. We have had none since I have lived in Avon, so please consider the DARE program. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you. Young lady on the end there. Yes. I was pointing to someone else, but she qualifies as a young lady.
Sue Henneberry, 488 Huckleberry Hill Road: Hold onto your hats. Florence, I agree with your point that property taxes are not enough to fund our public schools, that is why we are here and that is why we are debating, but until contractual obligations go away or the State funding formula changes or the way we fund our public schools, we are here for the situation that we are addressing tonight. So, unless we change the laws, here we are. I want to convey the sense of urgency here this evening has for all of us. The people behind me have 24 hours to set a budget. If they don’t do so in the next 24 hours, they will set a number that will be cast in stone for us to vote on and that second meeting will take place on April 13th, however, if history repeats
itself, they will make that decision tomorrow, so if you are not able to speak tonight, you need to e-mail these people your opinions. They will listen to you and they will respond appropriately, but you don’t have much time. I am here to support the budget as is without further reductions. At a time when childhood obesity is increasing and we are cutting out athletic and health programs, it makes no sense. At a time when our economy is becoming more global, we are reducing our languages instruction. It makes no sense. As the world becomes more technologically advances, we are putting off new technology purchases. So as a community in this room, we know the need for our students, but we are just not providing the funds to meet those needs. It all comes down to this. Are you willing to pay today for a more secure future tomorrow or do you want to continue to underfund the public schools and take a chance on what our future
holds. A strong democracy as present in this room, depends upon successful public schools. I urge you to support this modest budget as it is presented tonight. Please thank Hal and have this, can this be sent via e-mail to the people who are not here tonight, this link?
Thomas Harrison: I believe, well, yes, at avonassessor.com. That is all you really need.
Sue Henneberry: But could you send out a Town e-mail to the people who are not here tonight?
Thomas Harrison: Yes, I am sure that we could do that. Yes, thanks Sue. Yes.
Eileen Carol: This is my seventh year in Avon. I have children in kindergarten, second and third grades at Roaring Brook School. I fully support this budget, actually, I would support a higher budget, but I am sure that is not going to happen. My husband did not get a raise and he won’t be getting a raise, but we are willing to pay for the excellent services that our children are getting. Twenty-four years ago yesterday, my father died suddenly. I was a 15 year old high school sophomore with three siblings. My mother was a nurse working the 3-11 shift. This meant that no adult was home when we came home from school. Had it not been for school and the after school activities at my high school, there would have been three or four days a week in
which I had no significant interaction with an adult. If the school budget is cut below the 3% figure, if I am reading all of the papers and e-mails that I have seen this week correctly, after school sports and other after school activities may be cut. I understand that after school sports at the middle school are already gone in the 3% budget. Today, maybe families in Avon have two working parents or are in single parent homes. Allow yourselves to imagine how the young citizens in Avon will pass the hours between three and six or whatever time the parent gets home if there are no after school activities to occupy them. Having somewhere to go or something to do and responsible adults to supervise after school is not an extra. It is part of young people’s growth and development and it is not an abdication of parental responsibility. A budget is a statement of the community’s priorities. What is it saying about us that we
will cut the librarian, or one of the librarians at the elementary school. What does it say when we are cutting the guidance counselors from our school staff? Who is going to do what they currently do? Tonight I ask you to think about your own financial portfolios. I am not an economist, but I do know that when times are tough, you don’t get rid of the things that are performing well. The Avon public schools are performing well and even though their budgets have been trimmed every year for the past few years. I urge you to support the budget as it was represented tonight.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you. Okay, down the aisle there. Oh, yes, thank you.
Tom West, 27 Lakeview Boulevard: Good evening. I would agree with a lot of people who have come up here and speak about the school system in Avon. That is why I moved here ten years ago. We have two children in school right now and the educational opportunities that they have are spectacular, but we are going through year after year of trimming and trimming and trimming and how much longer are schools, is the school system going to be able to stand it. Right now, if you take a look at what was presented to us this evening, the cost per pupil spending in Avon has continued to lag after our neighboring communities year after year. We can’t continue to do this. We are educating our future taxpayers right now. We are educating the people that will
hopefully come back and pay taxes and support us when we get old and gray. We already have bare bones budgets pass year after year. We can’t continue to mine the asset that we have and the educational system we have is an asset, it is how we get more people to move into this Town. This is a momentary blip. This will be behind us in several years. The decisions that we make now will be with us forever. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison: Thank you. Yes, gentlemen on the other side, yes, right there. You.
Mitchell Piper, 129 Stagecoach Road: First of all, I would like to thank the Board of Finance. It is pretty amazing in these times that you can do a 1.3% increase and still get all of this in there. I am one of the people that supported the 6.9% increase for the Board of Education. We moved to Avon a little over five years ago for the sole reason of the school system. It is really disturbing when people get up and talk about the sports that their children used to have and the music their children used to have and yet somehow, those same people think that it is alright for us to have to pay for it now. I wonder when the Board of Finance looks at all of these cuts that are looked at in the school budget, when you look at music programs, sports programs, basically being
eliminated, and people having to pay for these things out of their pockets, how do you not consider that an increase in taxes, number one. And also, I would like to say, I also think that we need to look at the future and we need to look at what property values are doing all over the State. The one thing that Avon has always had is lower taxes than our neighbors in Simsbury, whom we all like to talk about. They are significantly lower taxes than Simsbury, higher property values and much higher per capita income. So, I really don’t see what the big fuss is, you know, I run an international business in New York City and also in Brussels. 94% of our budget goes to employees. When I look at this pamphlet that was given out by this committee, I think that it is pretty amazing that the Town of Avon has a very corporate structure in how they handle their employees. There are very few people at the top of the pay scale, a huge amount of
people in the middle of the pay scale and a very few people at the bottom of the pay scale. To me, this is a really enlightening document, but not for the reasons that it was handed out. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison: Anyone on this side, if not, there was someone a couple of rows, yes. Yes, you. Are you guys eighteen?
Girls: We are not allowed to speak?
Thomas Harrison: You have to be eighteen. You have to be a voter. Sorry, but those are the rules. You can send us an e-mail, but you have to be eighteen. Okay, would anyone else like to speak, okay, all the way in the back, yes.
Kathy Zirolli, 76 Tamara Circle: Hi, I do not have any say in the federal asset relief program, but I do have a say in my Town’s budget and I support what you have put forward. I would support a higher increase for the Board of Education, but I thank you all and I know that you all work very hard and I would like to give credit to you. I appreciate all of the effort that you put forth to come up with what you did tonight and the amount of information that you shared to explain where you got that. In terms of trying to think back when I grew up, and yes, I have my silver hair, maybe not as much as some, but when I grew up, I had no special needs children in my classroom, they were sequestered into a private area and no exposure no enlightenment on my part that inclusion.
Today, they are included and the cost of that is expensive, but it is worth it. I am not going to get into the contractual knowledge, I can’t go there, but I can say that it is worth it from what our children are learning and the enlightenment that they have that you all never had, and that I never had. I am grateful for that opportunity, but I need you to understand and research exactly what that costs and you cannot volunteer to do those positions. It is not possible. I know that. In terms of sports, oh my goodness. I had so many opportunities as a kid and so did my parents, in the public school system that we have stripped that away including the theater and the arts and sports. I really think that you need to look at the level base at what you had and what we have stripped away and where we are today. I know that one thing that I have learned, we never give back what we take away. Never. So the worse and
the more we cut it, it is just going to get worse and for that I am very sorry I have (inaudible) in the middle school and in just going into Thompson Brook and they will never know the joys that I had from theater and all of the sports that I had and it was even more in the south. So, I thank you for your time. Please don’t cut anymore.
Thomas Harrison: Okay, right here in the front row.
Ted Kusiak, 30 Steeplechase: I agree with most of what everybody said. I am just here to make one correction, with reference to the library. The library is really a continuation of education and I see it part of the education process. Come on in after school and you will see how they, the kids just transition from the school systems over to the library. Volunteers are always appreciated, we will take all of the volunteers we can get. Peggy, I really liked one of the things you said, the power of a book in a child’s hands, I hated history when I was growing up, and so the power of a book in an adult’s hand is still just as powerful. I just got done reading John Adams, and what a great book. I hated history growing up, but I have learned to
appreciate it as I have gotten older.
Thomas Harrison: Anybody on this side? Yes, you waiving your hand right there.
Susan McCabe, 146 Scoville Road: I happen to be the Pine Grove School librarian. I felt the need to speak tonight. The Board of Education already heard my speech, but I felt it was important to share it tonight as well. I am certified as a classroom teacher, a reading teacher and a librarian. This is my fifth year at the library at Pine Grove and I was in the classroom for ten years prior to that in the first grade classroom. I went through the alternate route to library certification for classroom teachers and I did enroll in the program when I was teaching first grade. I am here obviously about reducing the elementary library positions to half time. I realize that this is an extremely difficult time to make these budget decisions given our current economic
situation, but I feel that I would be remiss if I did not justify why I believe that the elementary librarian position should not be cut back to half time. When I began teaching at Pine Grove, the librarian was half time and had library media assistance in the library on the off week. And to go back to that model would be back tracking. The job description for a librarian has changed since then. The program that I was enrolled in was designed specifically for classroom teachers to become librarians. Collaboration with the classroom teachers being co-teachers is the goal of today’s library program. The Avon public school librarian has spent the last three years developing a library curriculum and research project continuum for grades K-12. It would be extremely difficult to follow the dictates of both unless there is a full time librarian in the elementary schools. It would be a misconception to think that all we do is check out
books. We are teacher librarians and I always put the word teacher first and whenever I meet teachers outside of school, I am most often introduced to parents as this is my library teacher. I am a teacher and as such, I have the yearly professional development goal just as my classroom colleagues do. For example, this year, the purpose of my developmental is a literacy objective using quality literature to support greater understanding of the CMT standards for the third graders. Last year, I collaborated with two fourth grade teachers on a project on colonial times that I put in technology and writing skills. I have also offered special programs for the school wide population such as book swaps, Be Free of TV participation, reading in the Avon Free Public Library, Read Across America and summer reading incentive. And by the way, our school was up from 60% participation in summer reading to 80% participation during this past summer as a result of
my collaboration with classroom teachers and the reading teachers. I have also been involved in grade
Thomas Harrison: About a minute if you could start
Susan McCabe: grade level programs such as literature for grades one and two and working with fourth graders on discussion groups. People are absolutely amazed when I tell them that this is a one person operation. I rely on parent volunteers and even fourth grade student volunteers to keep up with the daily requirements of this job. I tell people that this is three jobs rolled into one, teacher, librarian, and library-para. I cannot imagine how it would be possible to coordinate this type of quality program in two elementary schools being only half time in each school, and not to mention that there will not be full time computer personnel in the computer labs, which would mean that our role would become even more important. Volunteers are wonderful. I
couldn’t do my job without the volunteers, but I really don’t feel that they have the time that they can put into what I have to do on a daily basis at the library. I will leave you with one thought and this comes from a former commissioner of education. What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison: I appreciate your situation and I am sure that you understand that the Board of Finance cannot influence who gets hired and who doesn’t, but thank you very much for speaking from the heart. Okay, other speakers?
Christina Bill, 139 Woodford Hills Drive: I just want to say that because of Mrs. McCabe, my daughter is in the honors at the high school. She had her in first grade and she is awesome. I know that some people here are not here for the schools, but I couldn’t be happier and I totally support the budget. I have known Emily Jaratona very well since she has been in my son Andrew’s class since he was a little boy. She does want to have a voice tonight, so we thought that we would try to interpret, because I always wanted that job, what they want to say. She is the President of the eighth grade class and Olivia Piper is, you are also in student government, and also Olivia Piper just sang at the coffee house and has the most extraordinary opera voice I have ever
heard in my life, I mean, just amazing, and she’s had that support at school at the junior high because of the music programs. Both of the girls, and I will let them speak through us, but I do want to say that the program DARE that we have discussed, and I have spent a lot of time with my kids, a lot more than my parents did in the 60’s and 70’s and I thought they were good parents at the time, and they are still influenced by extraordinary things by the media and internet and they need us, that is true, but they spend a great deal of time, all day at school and the influences, so the program DARE for example, my son is in junior high, still talks about that. There are people drinking in junior high and he has mentioned that if it wasn’t for the officer that helped him, and by the way, he teaches karate and he is just a great kid in the community, but he has totally benefited from that program. But, Emily, what would you like to
say?
Thomas Harrison: I’m sorry, the Town Charter, Section 9.4.1 limits speakers to electors, meaning voters or taxpayer, people who own property, so we cannot allow.
Christina Bill: She is not speaking, I am speaking and I
Thomas Harrison: That’s fine. That’s fine. It does stay within the limits so.
Christina Bill: That’s okay, so, here we go, so is there anything, she wants to say that here text books are older than she is.
Thomas Harrison: I hope not as old as I am.
Anne O’Brien, 11 Stony Way: Also, both of these girls take eighth grade U.S. History and they are learning about their First Amendment Rights and free speech, so we wanted to share that with you. Olivia, is there anything you want me to say? Extra programs are essential for these students because in today’s world, they cannot be admitted to college based on GPA and SATs along. It is those extra programs that differentiate them. Harvard University alone had 29,000 applicants over that number, and many of them had perfect SAT scores and it is not their GPAs, it was what they did in their extracurricular activities that set them apart in terms of their abilities. Thank you very much. They would also like to compliment Mrs. LaFever as a wonderful teacher.
Thomas Harrison: Was there anybody at this end, the front end? Okay, sir, you are next.
Ian Charles, 27 Stockbridge Drive: I moved into Avon three weeks ago.
Thomas Harrison: Well, you picked a good time to move in. I hope you got a good deal on that house.
Ian Charles: The point I wanted to make is, (inaudible) you have a lot to be proud of in Avon because so many good things happen here. One of the things you need to remember, I’m talking to the Board of Finance, is that you have a lot of real good communities right next door and most of (inaudible) and that is a serious issue to think about right now. The biggest threat of a meeting that people come in, is education because of their kids and what they are not getting. That is what drives premier prices and I have to tell you that every one of these communities around you, we looked at Simsbury, we looked at Farmington, we looked at Granby, Canton, all of them, and more than once we heard about Avon and how they do not spend as much on their kids as we do. There
are a lot of houses out there and there are a lot of buyers, but you want, the asset base of this Town (inaudible) of this education budget. I think that it is almost a scary proposition. I just beg you to maintain this 3% increase and even consider doing a little bit better. This is a great community and I thank you. This has been a great forum.
Thomas Harrison: You, over to the side there.
Karen Cianci, 21 Volovski Road: I have heard a lot of good speeches tonight and after hearing all of them, I feel that I should get up and tell my story. I also feel that, Tom, you are a genius when it comes to numbers and financing, but I have to say that I think you should recognize the applause meter of the people that are here because we have been encouraged for several years, where parents of school aged children who are tired in the evening and we have been encouraged to come up and we came up and I am hearing tonight a lot of applause from parents of school age children who support the 3% budget and I actually hear some really weak applause from the ones who don’t support the budget, so I just think that the applause meter is a good indicator. I would also like to
Thomas Harrison: Although it doesn’t help, we do respect your idea.
Karen Cianci: And I also believe that the two young girls that came from the eighth grade, who I happen to know both of them, they are very dear great kids, but I think that they were treated somewhat unfairly and I think that, possibly, you could have told them what their alternative could have been so they didn’t have to, the fact that they were reduced to tears shows their passion for their school and for their teachers and I also believe that Mrs. LaFever is an awesome educator because she goes way above and beyond what she has to do in a normal day, as do all of the teachers in the school system. Quickly, I moved to Avon 14 years ago. I spent my entire life in Boston and I heard about Avon, Connecticut because my next door neighbors had cousins who living in Avon and Simsbury.
I was introduced to my husband from one of my Connecticut cousins. I moved to the Hartford area when I first came to Connecticut, but my husband and I decided to settle in Avon because all we heard about how fine Avon, Connecticut is. I have a son who is 16 years old and is a sophomore in high school and a daughter who is 12 and she is in the sixth grade at Thompson Brook School. I love Avon and I love the school system and I love the landscape of Avon with its parks and playgrounds and safe neighborhoods. You can say that Avon has grown on me. Both of my kids love their schools and they love their friends and they love Avon. We now call Avon our home and we plan to be here for a long while, but there is one thing that bugs me about Avon. It is the awful feeling that I get every time that the calendar turns to budget time. It reminds me of the divide that we have in Town between those with school age children and those without,
between those who understand the challenges of an education in the 21st century and those who do not. Now it seems that the budget divide is permeating all of Avon throughout the year, even when it is not crunch time in March, April and May. We are arguing about, talking about, discussing about, getting frustrated about, getting sad about, those two girls who were reduced to tears, about spending $30 and $40 per month. It is even affecting our kids in high school now, they are hearing about cuts to their dearest teachers, whom they love and their guidance counselors and to a librarian in one of the elementary schools who I am embarrassed that somebody got up and said that we could volunteer a librarian. That is so embarrassing and I think that person owes the librarian an apology. I would like to point out that education has no resemblance whatsoever now, to what it did 30 or 40 years ago, I repeat, education now in the 21st
century gives no resemblance to where it was 30 or 40 years ago. I just finished reading a book and a lot of people in Town have read this, A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. It is a fascinating read, Larry Sparks from Roaring Brook School has put this book in the Roaring Brook School library along with a DVD from PBS broadcasting. I just want to read a couple of things.
Thomas Harrison: As long as you are in your time limit.
Karen Cianci: I just want to read a few pages. The last few decades belong to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind, (inaudible), but the keys to the kids are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind to mind. It belongs to creators, meaning makers, story tellers essentially, they are right brain thinkers. The teachers in the Avon public school system have responded so well to this right brain discipline. They are working longer hours, they are understanding what the needs of the world today or in terms of the right brain thinkers. The book describes a seismic, which means an earthquake proportion shift. The parents and the teachers have felt that seismic shift. We are dealing with
it. Quickly, I am not sure how I am going to end this, but um, we need to respond to this and I think the teachers are responding quite well. I do not think that the teachers are over paid in anyway. I think that actually, they are less than fairly paid. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison: I’m not sure about our Board, but I think we may all be left brain thinkers, so we have to come up with the money. Yes.
Valerie Ferro: First, I have a challenge for the Town Council. In the next 60 days, I want to see an alternative to reaching out to children under the age of 18 that wish to speak publically about certain programs in the schools. I have attended public hearings throughout the State, probably 40 or 50 public hearings. I have never seen someone under the age of 18 been denied at least a couple of minutes to express themselves. So, within 60 days, I think that you folks need to reach out and find a way to do it, either have a separate session in the schools or provide, set aside 15 or 20 minutes to allow the children to come in and express themselves. The future is our children and I don’t think that we should exclude them. With that being said, I certainly
support the budget, I would support even a larger increase, the reason being is that we are cutting into the instructional fabric of our educational system. The fabric of our educational programs, teachers and how they teach. About eight years ago, we were actually accused of providing a designer education here in Avon. That is what it was called, and we cut and we cut and we cut and so now we have trimmed that fabric to threads. We are cutting health and cultural activities like music and sports. They all teach leadership skills, they teach survival skills. They are what everyone needs to survive, regardless of your age, so I think that we need to forego the drama. Some of the stories you heard tonight are the stories we always hear from the same people, so let’s forego the drama. We understand that the cumulative impacts of eight, nine, ten years of cuts and while I certainly do not enforce cutting health and disposing of
middle school athletics, heaven forbid at a time when the kids need a physical outlet as they are developing, if you guys have a better idea, fine, but I don’t see one, so with that, let’s forgo the drama, let’s get this thing passed. I think that we are all giving up something on all sides, on all sides. But if we could just acknowledge the fact that we have given up and we continue to give up, many of us, although it is not, our taxes are giving hundreds of dollars in pay to play and other programs and even seven years ago, I looked at my ledgers, I was paying about $200 a child. I am up to about $900 now, so I am paying and that is not coming off my taxes. So, let’s get this thing done. I think that we need to pull together, we can have differences, we can have differences of opinions with different perspectives, so let’s come together here, pass this thing where it is, I certainly endorse you to keep it where it is and
let’s get down to business. Thanks.
Thomas Harrison: Would anyone else like to speak? Going once, oh yes, I’m sorry, there are people walking by and I didn’t see you.
Joanne Beers, 48 Brookridge Drive: I have lived in Avon
Thomas Harrison: Please keep it down so the speaker can be heard.
Joanne Beers: I have lived in Avon since 1979. My husband and I are retired, but as I said at meetings before, we also have a 16 year old daughter in the high school. We live on a fixed income from my former employer and we live on social security from my husband, who has gray hair like many of the people in this room. Our taxes, I estimated earlier today will go up about $22.60 a month. Our oil budget payment has gone down more than $200 a month since last year. I drive a Prius which gets great gas mileage, but last year I was paying $4.00 a gallon for oil, for gas and this year I am paying about $2.00 a gallon for gas. I guess what I would like to make clear is that I am completely in support of a 3% budget increase for the Board of Education and a 2.98% tax
increase if that is what it comes down to, if it comes down to a little more than 2.98%, that’s fine with me. I think everyone in this room should remember that a lot of people who come out of the corporate world are not getting increases, they are not getting bonuses like they have in the past, but social security went up 5.8% for 2009. Thank you.
Thomas Harrison advises audience that, there being no further discussion, the Budget, in its final format, will be presented to the Annual Budget Meeting on Monday, May 4, 2009, at the Avon Senior Center, 7:30 p.m. and will be submitted to vote at Referendum on May 13, 2009.
Thomas Harrison: Anyone else? Okay, well thank you all very much for being well spoken. We will adjourn the meeting.
The meeting adjourned at 10:20 p.m.
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