Skip Navigation
This table is used for column layout.
Board of Finance 04/09/2012 Public Hearing Minutes
BOARD OF FINANCE
MINUTES
PUBLIC HEARING MEETING
April 9, 2012


  • CHAIR, BOARD OF FINANCE: Thomas Harrison
Preside and Convenes meeting
Leads Audience in Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag
Advises the audience of the order of the presentation tonight

Thomas Harrison: Good evening, welcome and thank you for coming. I see a lot of familiar faces, some new ones. There are some new folks here. The pattern will follow the sandry pattern.  A couple of introductory things, then we have the slide presentations, I think the TC goes first this year. Then the BOE, and then the BOF brings up the rear with some fiscal notes and that. Then we’ll do the speaking, we’ll move the microphone to the center but will keep it here for now so it doesn’t block the slide projector. If you want to speak, this seemed to work well last year so we’ll keep the same process, you’ll line up by this door here, to your left and my right. You’ll walk to the center, do your schpeal, and then if you remember to leave on the far side so you don’t bump into someone coming up next. We do have a limited, so that to give everyone a chance to speak at least once, we ask that you keep your remarks to around 3-3 and ½ minutes, something like that. If you have more to say and everybody else has had their first chance to speak you are welcome to come back. You know the rules, the charter spells it out.  Speaking is limited to 2 categories of people, electors and taxpayers.  An elector is somebody who is 18 years of age and is registered to vote. We have one of the registrars; Ann Clark is here if you have any questions if you’re not sure if you are registered, she is up here in front. But that’s it; you have to be 18 and registered. The taxpayer qualification basically is designed to accommodate people who may own property in Avon but don’t live here. To speak as a taxpayer you have to be a U.S. citizen, be 18 years of age, and own property in Avon that has a dollar value, an assessed value, of at least $1,000 as of last October 1st. We will ask everybody for purposes of keeping record if you will give your full name and address. The meeting is being recorded; our clerk is going to transcribe all of that, so we ask that you please state your name and address. Steve Bartha will be seated up here with a card system to show your timing.  We’ll let you know when you have a little bit of time left. We’ll try to keep that scheduled. Once again the last couple of years it was very helpful, we ask that we keep this as an adult conversation. We keep it friendly, nothing personal; we don’t attack each other or members of any of the boards. We are all Avon residents and we all work very well together. The storm thing last fall and we’d like to have that same kind of spirit here tonight, I’m sure we will.  That’s the ground rules; I’ll go over it again when we get to it. What I’d like to do now is introduce the members of the Board of Finance.     

First our Vice Chairman and Secretary Thomas Gugliotti, James Speich, Catherine Durdan, Margaret Bratton, and our two newest members are sitting down at the end, Dean Hamilton and Brian Stoll. They are both doing a great job for us this year and they are coming up to speed very quickly. The only thing that they had to prepare them for this just didn’t happen. First year since I’ve been on the board we didn’t have the usual array of emails and messages going around for tonight. So I don’t know what that means but you guys can take full credit for that because since you’ve been on the board we didn’t have that issue.
Anyway, the first presentation is from the Town Council.  I call on Mark Zacchio to present the budget presentation and the request for the Town Council.

I’m sorry; we also do the pledge of allegiance. If you’d all stand for the pledge of allegiance.

2.      CHAIR, TOWN COUNCIL: Mark Zacchio
Presents the Town Council, Sewer, Debt Service and Capital Improvement budget for FY 2012/2013.

Mark Zacchio: Good evening everybody. I’ll give Steve a chance to get the presentation up. I promise my presentation will be short. I’ve been warned if I go over 15 minutes I’ll be fined $1,000 per minute. We start with our mission statement of the town, as always try to provide quality town services with at a reasonable cost to all its citizens and tax payers, something the TC always keeps in mind each year so we like to start off with that slide.  I’m going to start off with what exactly makes up the operating budget on the town side tonight. The majority of it is within General Government.  Now that’s the Town Hall services, billing department, point of revenue and other departments.  Public safety is the next one on the list. Public safety includes the police department, the fire department and even ambulance services. Public Works comes in of course with paving and road maintenance and what have you. Social Services, Parks and Rec and Education primarily is made up of the Operating Budget for the library and conservation and development. The way that actually breaks out is about 43.5% of that is within the public safety sector, so mostly the police department, fire department and ambulatory services. Second is public works with about 22% and about 14 or 15% make up the rest of the government. We try and retain our core services each year. We are very mindful to where the economy has gone and (Inaudible) some form of tax. We walk in each budget year with public safety and social services as one of our top priorities. Of course we depend on our police department and our ambulatory services more and more each year within Avon as we’ve grown both in a children perspective but also in an aging perspective. We need to rely heavily upon those emergency services. Social Services, you don’t see them a whole lot in the papers about Avon and the need for social services. You’ll see further in the presentation that we have actually shared Social Services department personnel with Canton and have recently broken from that model because each town is seeing the greater need for social services. We certainly try to maintain or in some cases of reduced services when possible and we also have tried to contract out services much like you’ve seen in the private sector over the years where it made sense. Some examples of this include street sweeping, ground maintenance, plowing in certain situations and janitorial services. These are all places we’ve contracted out because it’s just a better efficiency for us from a dollars perspective. The next item long term liabilities is really important to us for a couple of reasons, we have a number of employees obviously that are still within our pension program. For those of you who don’t know, Avon does not offer a fine benefit program to new employees hired after 1997. So we have a number of retirees now collecting their pension as well as a number of retirees that WILL collect their pension and we have a funding liability that has to go with that account. We are in year 4 of a 7-year focus from an audit we had some years ago. To be able to get up to a funding level that made sense for us so that pension plan could continue on. As we look at that, I think the biggest cost there has been the health care increase. (Inaudible)We certainly try and actively manage our personnel resources; we’ve only filled essential positions. As you’ll see we have a level staffing this year over last year and this slide we’ll talk a little bit about how that relates to the population over the last few decades. What we have increased this year quite a bit is our CIP budget. You’ve heard me say over the last few years that our Capital Improvement budget those are items that cost more than $20,000 and generally have a longer life expectancy than 5 years. Those are items like buildings and infrastructure. Items that if you let them go to long they will cost us a lot more in the long run. Fire trucks fall into this category. Some of the larger pieces of equipment that Public Works uses fall into this category. So we are seeing our maintenance costs going much higher than they should be and over the last few years we had funded that at a lower level in recognition for the growth in the town as well as in the schools but we really have to put some more in that budget this year. Still falling short of where we were at a few years ago but a significant increase over last year. From a raw numbers perspective, that first line, the Town Operating budget, you’ll see an increase of 2.91%. That’s started with about 3.5% from the Town Manager. The Town Manager made a number of significant reductions before it came before the TC. In the council’s all day Saturday budget workshop made some reductions and added a few things in actually and came up with a budget of 2.91%. In dollars, that’s $568,398.00. The sewers, which are in the budget but are not funded by tax levy, has an increase of 2.53%. That is 100% funded by those of you who have sewers and pay a sewer fee. It is in the budget for the purposes of gross budgeting. The debt service, this is our long term obligations that we pay both principle and interest on from what we have borrowed in the past, a good example being the library that will come on line next year, the school construction is in here and other construction projects that have happened over the last close to 20 years. There’s a significant reduction close to $261,000. All that means is that we’ve retired some debt, we’ve paid off the mortgage so to speak, on some of the projects in the past and we are not replacing it with any new debt so our interest and principle payments have gone down. CIP budget is (Inaudible) 33.5% increase over last year and that’s where we landed last year. It’s only in new dollars $475,000.00 and still 1.8 million-1.9 million is still near 20% less than it was about 5 years ago. That’s a significant impact to our infrastructure over the last 5 or 6 years and it’s something that we really have to make an investment in this year. So we’ve recognized that we’re in a challenging economic climate, one of the indicators the town uses, I know you’ve heard Tom talk about it before, is our grand list growth. Grand list growth this year was really only an increase of 1.12% that gives us new money in terms of how we spend in town without taking any tax revenue from this end. On a five-year average, to give you a basis, a 5-year average is about a 4% increase in grand list and a ten year average about a 5.19% increase, so significantly less than we’ve seen in the past and puts more pressure on the tax levy of course through this process. The 2.91% to break it out, $269,000 of that is in salaries and wages, that’s based off of negotiated contracts with our Police Department, our Public Works Department and other bargaining units as well as some increases in non-organized labor, that’s our administrative staff and our professional staff. OPEB funding and retiring health $95,000 that was the increase that I referred to before from our seven year schedule. $55,000 from hospitalization and (Inaudible)and of course we’ve all felt the pinch at the pump, $47,000 more budgeted next year in anticipated costs for fuel. We certainly focus on personnel and management; we use a phase in approach to fill vacant positions.  In the old days maybe we would have hired someone as quickly as we possibly could, a replacement for when someone left a department we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can in the short term, cover for those lapse and long term if it’s possible and not hire for that position but over that period of time instead of a salary of $50,000 for the entire year we might budget $25,000 and hire that person 6 months into the year in order to ease the budget concern.  We certainly have reduced staff where we have been able to do that in the past and contracted out for more services, you’ll see a level of that and I’ll talk more about that at an upcoming slide. We certainly work with our human resources department as well as some of our professional staff on negotiating contracts, we have a good faith with our labor union and find fair and equitable ranges for increases and amounts that they contribute to their employment and benefits which we think is really important and we’ll continue to do that. I’m sure with the competitive economy we attract good talent yet we are not overpaying in an environment that we know has lost (Inaudible). This slide is interesting I leave it in each year. (Inaudible)… a level of funding of $106,000 so far compared to last year. Good comparison as to where Avon has gone since 1970. There is steep growth in population and for those that have been here along time I’m sure you’ve seen. But what’s really interesting is we are .5% of that ratio in the number of books that we have servicing our town. That’s something that I think shows our really progressive management style in terms of the number of employees that it takes and the types of efficiencies and technology we put in to deliver the same value to a greater number of people with the same ratios we did in the 70’s and 80’s. That’s a real testament to the management team. This slide just shows our debt service over time. You can see here we are in 2012, the yellow depicts the principle, and the dark color is the interest. You can see that we are creating a lot of capacity in terms of our debt service in the former eight years. You can see the one place where it comes out is when the library bonds are fully out but other than that we have a pretty low debt service for the future so that $261,000 I showed before (Inaudible) our mortgage and interest payments will continue in the future years. There are some projects loaded in here, the library of course is there, some future road paving, fire station training, facilities, some improvements at fisher meadows, the town roads. With more roads comes more maintenance. We certainly have a lot of room and capacity, another example of a pretty conservative approach to our debt. From a Capital Improvement perspective we really are loading this up. This is a 33% increase from last year, these are all the specific items that are in here, road service improvements, certainly you’ve been driving around on the roads and we’re lucky we’ve had a pretty easy winter this year but the past winters have certainly paid no respect to our roadways and our roadway rating across town has been diminishing over time, we would like to make some improvements to our roads. There is about $300,000 in here for interactive boards and LCD projectors for BOE, something that is sorely needed across classrooms. Some classrooms with them and some without. This seems to equalize that across the schools. (Inaudible) extension for the sewers, $275,000 (Inaudible) clearly ones that are important to us in our infrastructure. These are projects that don’t go away. So next year if we don’t fund them they’ll be here again and they’ll be more expensive. In a lot of ways the infrastructure that could crumble around them creates a bigger wall for us to climb over in the future. Many of you remember we embarked on a process to try to find some shared services within town. We had a major study of facilities and maintenance committee that was pulled together that did a lot of work around to find ways internally that we could share services. Some of the outcome of that has been put in place already and some of that is being worked on, some good examples are vehicle maintenance, bidding for services, the human resources department and BOE and Town are starting to put this together, certainly with our financial services with Gary Mala and the changes within the budget process. Creating a collaborative environment across the 2 boards to find ways to be more efficient. We also do that outside the town perimeter, we engage the police department in the north central municipal accident reconstruction swat, narcotics task force. We share our assessor and our animal control officer with Canton; we have reached across with our ambulatory services with Farmington. Currently we are on our own with the ambulance services in Avon but we still look across town to find ways that are more efficient to deliver the same number of services. We are currently engaged with surrounding towns on a possible centralization of our dispatch services for police and fire, there’s a lot more to come on that, Chief Rinaldo is working on that and will present that in the future. Just another opportunity for us to share resources across towns if they make sense for us to do so. So as a recap, our Operating Budget request this year is 2.91%, $568,000 in new tax levy. That combined with sewers, debt service and the increase in CIP, it comes to an even 3% request, $825,792.00. If you don’t already subscribe to news in Avon, we’ve got much better news coverage now with Patch thanks to Jessie Sawyer, shout out to Jessie (Applause) who gets news out much more quickly and now we have a much more informed public, but we do have a subscribe to news section of our website. You can check off if you want community news, it will be delivered to your email through a push system and it’ll keep you up to date as time goes on.  I appreciate your attention tonight and I hope you’ll support our budget going forward and I look forward to hearing from Gary.

Thomas Harrison: Thank you Mark, as always it was an excellent presentation. Now it is the Board of Education’s turn and I’d like to introduce the chairman of the board, Peggy Roell.

3.      CHAIR, BOARD OF EDUCATION: PEGGY ROELL
Presents the Board of Education budget for FY 12/13     

Peggy Roell: Thanks Tom, welcome. I’d like to begin by introducing the other Board of Education Members that are here. Vice Chairman Bill Stokesbury, Kathy Zirolli, Wendy Howard, Jay Spivak, and our administrators in addition to Gary Mala that you’ll meet in a minute, Dr. Donna Rusack and our new Director of Finance. Last year at this time Gary had only been with us 32 days. At that meeting I recorded that in the first month Gary had already begun extensive review and analysis of all of our operations including that the Board of Ed form both a finance committee and an audit committee, which we have done. A year later I can honestly say that truly that was just the beginning of Gary’s work. I’d like to take just a minute to kind of summarize some of the things that have happened over the last year. Gary’s not only implemented reverse auctioning and an energy education program, both which will save the town significant money on an ongoing basis, but he also expedited our budget preparation time lines so that the Board of Ed’s approved operating budget was available to be combined with the Town’s proposed budgets prior to the Town Manager’s submission to the Town Council. The hiring of Donna and John were outstanding additions to the district’s leadership team. Donna has already actively begun leading the district staff with updating our curriculum on a kindergarten through grade 12 bases. Donna’s also actively involved in preparation for our upcoming reaccreditation of Avon High School that will actually occur in the fall of 2013 and there is lots of prep work before then. John is currently overseeing the installation of our new financial software system which will go live as of July 1st. I’d like to give a special thanks to the Town Council and the Board of Finance for understanding the administration’s needs for accurate and timely financial information and thus allowing this purchase to happen on an expedited basis. In order to have much greater transparency in our financial reporting, John was also responsible for insuring the accuracy of the gross up of our budgets so that all projected revenues and expenditures are now properly reflected. In addition working together with the town staff and outside auditors, Gary and John assured that the revolving fund was completely closed out which resulted in the return of significant accumulated funds from the Board of Ed. to the Town’s General Fund. Gary was also a very active participant in the Town’s Storm Alfred response. Not only regularly greeting Town folk using the shelter at the Avon High School but meeting with Mark, Jamie, Denis, Steve and other town leaders on a daily basis to ensure the school staff were active participants throughout the relief effort. Gary’s also facilitated the almost complete strategic planning process, which included not only Board of Ed members but school staff and parents but also non-parent community representatives. Hopefully by now you’ve either gotten to meet Gary and speak with him directly and/or seen some of his regular written communications, updates to parents, staff and the entire community. I hope everyone is appreciating Gary’s regular communications with all segments of the Avon community. At this time I would like to ask Gary, because he keeps saying his dad is Mr. Mala so I can’t call him Mr. Mala, to come forward to share with you the highlights of the proposed 2012/2014 Education budget. Thank you.

4.      SUPERINTENDANT: Gary Mala
Presents the Board of Education budget for FY 12/13

Gary Mala: Good evening everyone. Can you hear me in the back? Hi Jamie. I just want to try one more thing before we move on. (To Steve- That doesn’t work, I’ll just prompt you) Good evening ladies and gentleman, I appreciate being here what seems like 32 years as opposed to 1 year 32 days. I want to echo Peggy Roell’s comment regarding what I’m going to characterize a renewed spirit of cooperation among the 3 Boards. Very significant position on behalf of this community. I appreciate the opportunity to be here to review the Board of Education proposed budget. As Mark mentioned, the town has objectives that serve as the foundation of We simply call our foundations request and these are the things we attempted to achieve.

(Inaudible) for 2 seconds

To continue to advocate what we believe are our moral and ethical obligations to the children we serve by providing the highest quality education to all children when they come to us. We continue to operate in a fiscally responsible manner during a time of unprecedented economic decline, some of which has been referenced in the previous presentations. We work to maintain our existing programs. We also work diligently to maintain our existing class sizes, as we know them now. Peggy touched upon one of the most significant changes between last years budget and this years proposed budget is that the dramatic change to our reflecting gross budget, which does in fact document all revenues and expenditures. (Next Slide) We work to strengthen our existing programs and activities that we provide to our children. We did that a number of ways and proposed to do that in a number of ways. To implement a curriculum revision schedule with text book acquisitions. We also are preparing Avon High School as we referenced last year and again as Peggy mentioned earlier. Preparing Avon High School for accreditation by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. For those of you that may not be familiar with that process, it happens once every ten years, is a rigorous accreditation process where we have to demonstrate adherence to a number of standards in a variety of different areas. We also strengthen our existing programs and activities by expanding support service to English language learners due to increased enrollments and the number of children speaking other languages. We continue to focus our professional development based on the priorities that you’ll see and are articulated in the very near future in the strategic plan. (Next Slide) Again, to continue to strengthen our existing programs and activities, we worked to eliminate a graduation fee. We were charging a fee for our children to graduate from our high school. We worked to reinstate a late bus opportunity at both the middle school and high school for the purposed of increasing the number of students that participate in after school programs that are solely funded by PTO and other volunteer groups, for which we are very appreciative. We also worked to institute an athletic uniform replacement cycle in the face of having them. We work to acquire and implement new technology; Mark referenced this in his presentation around the Capital Budget. The first two items, creating a wireless infrastructure in our schools and also to install classroom interactive white boards and projectors in classrooms that currently are not equipped with such are included in the Capital side of the budget, not the operating side. We continue to advance the acquisition of e-books to replace textbooks as we know them. We’re in the throws of using them in coursework involved at the high school and middle school. This budget works to maintain what’s called “Virtual High School”. Offering the opportunity for our high school students to engage and enroll in courses that are not offered in the program of studies currently at the high school. The budget also has a foundation to provide necessary training for technology staff so they can in fact adequately maintain the technology that we are acquiring in the schools. Our enrollment numbers are displayed behind me. You’ll see that the Avon Public Schools is in a period of leveling off. These are projected numbers, the projected numbers that were done as part of a 2008 study that we currently rely on to forecast out our annual budget. As a part of this enrollment you’ll see, or you won’t see, Avon High School currently has an enrollment, a projected enrollment just shy of 1,150. Avon Middle School is just shy of 600. Thompson Brook School will have an enrollment just shy of 600. Roaring Brook School will also have an enrollment just shy of 600. Pine Grove School will be in around 635-650 students. Our schools are at capacity, as you know them. (Next Slide) The figure change relates to the gross budgeting system that accounts for all revenue and expenditures. When you look at this slide though, you’ll recall that the adopted budget for 11/12, some 47 million dollars, there was unbudgeted revenues and expenditures that were maintained as part of a revolving account, which has been dissolved which actually led our budget in the gross to be for this current year we are in $49,420,920.00. When you compare that against what we are proposing as a gross budget in excess of 50 million dollars it results in a budget increase between the two years of $1,440,927.00, or 2.92%. Not like the other Town Budget, the other corporation budgets, the number of publicly funded agency budgets, you’ll notice that over 93% of the cost included in this budget are what I call “non-discretionary”, and that includes salary and the cost of providing health care, benefits, transportation services that we are mandated to provide, total in-district and out-of-district accounts for the non-discretionary costs like special education tuitions that serve children who require services outside of our schools and also magnet school tuitions, cost of utilities, it’s pretty self explanatory. We are embarking on an aggressive conservation project and program for over the next few years to assist with cost containment in that area. In the last area of non-discretionary has to do with providing cafeteria programs and requirements of grants and accounting for revenue. Other contracted services which represents a small percentage, leads you to a total of the proposed request, just over $1,500.00. If you ask the question what accounts for the budget increase of 1.4 million dollars, it falls in two major categories; one is salaries and benefits which are combined together and those are negotiated, settlements and also non-affiliated or un-affiliated employees, who are not represented by a bargaining unit. The total amount of the 1.4 million is $905,000.00, $356,000.00 being attributed to the projected 8.5% increase to the cost of health benefits, which is also reflected in the entire town budget. (Next Slide) Full-Time equivalent positions in this budget at this point, I’m asking for support for full time equivalent number of positions is 465.3. The categories are also eliminated there; you can see that the largest piece of the pie served by the staff, direct service provided to the children. Most schools are labor intensive. (Next Slide) This slide, you had an opportunity to look at it in the packet, will break out by category; certified, non-certified and other job titles and categories equivalent full time positions that we’re seeking. Of the certified positions, you’ll notice that 173.8 are classroom teachers and also offer art, music, physical education, library media specialist that require a certification. We have counselors at the middle school, the high school and one at the elementary schools. We also have speech and language pathologist, social workers, and other positions that require certification but they don’t necessarily serve a fixed classroom of students at any point in time. We found this important to bring to your attention. The projected class size, as I said earlier, is one of the foundations of the budget was to work diligently to keep class sizes where we know that are the least in the most recent past. This is a projection of class sizes Kindergarten through grade 6, 18-23 in range. I caution you and we’ll look at this slide together because this is an ever-changing slide. If someone were to ask me how many children are enrolled for next year I can’t provide that answer. The fact is student that continue to immigrate in and we have others that may leave, so the numbers themselves are fixed using the October 1st date and that is common statewide. And again, the message for this slide is to work diligently to maintain our class size. At the secondary level, the class size is ranging from 20-24 depending on courses that students register for. At the middle school and high school level it’s hard to get an average class size because the students actually register for courses and we could have higher-class sizes in one course and lower in another. The foundation impacts- what are the impacts that I started off by saying is the impact of our projected budget. Another way of saying it is what’s included (Inaudible) 1.4 million dollar increase. We expand the new teaching staff at the high school by 0.5. I want to offer clarification for some of you that have participated in previous presentations that John, Donna and I have done with various groups. We are adding 2 full time equivalent positions to the high school teaching compliment. 1.5 of which is being re-appropriated due to declining enrollment in another school. So this budget is reflecting this, or this slide is only reflecting the new items included plus that .5 and the cost is less. As mentioned earlier, we are providing additional support for English Language Learner population; this is a tutor position, not a certified teacher position. Thompson Brook School currently has larger English Language Learners. It does support professional development, an increase in professional development. I’d like to go on record saying what I’ve said to the Board of Education many times, professional development and training and providing training opportunities to our professionals is critical to the success of not only the schools but any organization. From NEASC, again that is New England Accreditation of Schools and Colleges; this amount of money will support the necessary preparation work, as this year is the last year to prepare for that visitation that happens in the fall of 2013. It does support some of the curriculum; one of the initiatives that Donna has marked upon is implementing a revised curriculum revision schedule and a textbook acquisition cycle. We begin with English Language Arts and Mathematics, it will move up to Science and this summer curriculum, writing allows to draw upon the staff who are not ordinarily (Inaudible). Technology training is referenced; it references the training that provides (Inaudible) the immigration of technology into our schools. As I said before, this is a total cost which we would incur to provide the service again to our middle school and high school students. A graduation fee account for $10,000, a uniform replacement cycle- it is a 5 year cycle and we are making a request for $30,000 to embark upon that. This budget does reflect a budget contingency item with a modest amount of $25,000 included in there. We have no, as a Board of Education budget, we have a fixed number. Regardless of what occurs over the school year, even unanticipated expenditures, we need to look within our budget to be able to manage those unanticipated expenditures. When and only when we exhaust all of those options would we come forward in the form of requesting supplemental appropriations so $25,000 is earmarked for unanticipated expenses that could occur or will occur in the 12/13 year. (Next Slide) This is just an informational slide, this is from 10/11 and this is the most recent information that we could obtain from our state department of education. What it does, they have a formula that equalizes and apples to apples comparison, a net per pupil expense by district and cost to the state. They do that by taking out a number of factors and then comparing us. You can see that Avon in 10/11 is not at the top end, is not at the bottom end, we are in the middle and the net per pupil is reflected in green. So how does this budget compare to others that you might be reading about? This slide has a slightly updated from previous presentations. I propose a budget to the Board of Education for consideration with a 2.92% increase. The state average as of April 2nd of Superintendent proposed budgets, it was 2.94% and then the out column shows the average Board of Education accepted budgets of 2.92% and the average statewide as of April 2nd, 2.68%. (Next Slide) I want to end my presentation by highlighting what we appreciated and continue to appreciate as the, what I call, the gems of the Avon Public Schools. That in fact is the levels to which our students perform each and every year. The last few items here are evidence of the data points and we should reflect upon this pride as a community. Our student’s performance on scholastic aptitude tests, they outperform their peers in our state and in the nation. They also take an extraordinary number of advanced placement examinations and for those that do participate, they achieve at exceptional levels thus granting them the opportunity to have college credit prior to them leaving high school. The results of the 2011 Connecticut Mastery Test continue to show how Avon students perform compared to similar school districts and also are ranked number 1 in area for mathematics in grade 5, reading in grade 6 and writing in grade 8. Class of 2011, there are some statistics there that speak to our students success in the National Merit’s Scholar Program, which is based on their performance on the PSAT’s. Our students continue to have post-secondary plans and pursue higher education. For the class of 2011, over 91% of our students were prepared and selected and had a desire to move to higher…

Flip Tape

…Board of Education and staff that serves that Board of Education are committed to clear communication and transparent processing. We are committed to providing rigorous, comprehensive and innovative programs that actually capture student creativity and increase performance in academic areas. We are committed to meeting the needs of all students within both state and national requirements as we are mandated to do so. We are committed to continuous improvements that are systematically assessing what our actions are and what the outcomes of our actions are. For those of you who had the pleasure of participating in the strategic planning process … will actually benefit from hearing us present that document will openly admit that we are committed to saying what we are going to do. And last and certainly not least, we stand committed to using all of our resources, both financial and human resources, in the most efficient and effective way possible to meet the needs of all students we serve. I appreciate, again, the opportunity that Avon provides to me as a professional, I appreciate the support of a leadership team that has been continually called upon to look for efficiencies, and I say that with a smile, and I do appreciate your support moving forward, thank you.

5.      CHAIR, BOARD OF FINANCE: Thomas Harrison

Thomas Harrison- Thank you Peggy and Gary. We are going to talk fiscal now. Most of you have been to these things before and as you’re aware, the differences among the three Boards, they are all a little different. Their jobs are different, their approaches are different. Their power, sometimes, is a little more controversial than the others. But we do have a job to do and we do it to the best of our ability and what we believe to be is in the best interest of our town. We’ll get started in just a moment with the slides. I’m not going to go through these but this one set of numbers I’d like to focus on, it’s this one right here. The spending increase for everything you’ve heard about so far, 2.95%, but you see the tax increase, the mill rate increase we need to pay for that is 3.55% and to the extent of evil of that you’re asking us questions about the budget,(Inaudible) why is it that with 2.9% spending increase why do we have to have a much higher tax increase? The next slide will address that issue. What we do is we start with the total budget, the unified budget, remember here we have Avon is 1 Avon- we have one budget that covers schools, sewers, police, everything. The unified budget, 79.1 million, was requested. We start by looking at all the non-property tax revenues, that’s about 9.9 million, that leaves us about 69.2 million that we have to raise from the only source of income that we have, directly in Avon, which is the property tax. I’ll give you some breakdowns on some of these things a couple of slides later. So we have to come up with another 69.2 million dollars. How do we get there? We start at the currently mill rate, which is 25.04. We put how much that will raise and we add to it the grand list growth. Now Mark Zacchio talked about that and we have a slide coming up but the grand list growth isn’t what it used to be. In the past we could count on 2,3 or even 4 million dollars new to the grand list growth. This year you see $740,000. It just doesn’t cut it the way it used to. In your handout it shows a chart of the referendum results for each year since we’ve had a referendum and we show each year the percentage of unified spending increase and the mill rate that the voters approved and you will see that up until about 3 years ago we could use a 3% mill rate increase to support a 5% spending increase. We cannot do that anymore so the past 3 years it’s been flipped over from what we all got used to in the 90’s and the early years of this decade. So the current mill rate, when you throw in the grand list growth, it gets us 66.8 toward the 69.2, that means a shortfall of 2.4 million dollars. The only way that we can get there is to increase the mill rate. And if you do the math there, that comes out to a 3.55% mill rate increase to support the tax and spending increases that are in the proposed budget requests. So that, in short, is why we have a higher tax rate percentage increase than we do spending rate. We talked about the 3 questions, what’s the role, how do we raise revenues and how we are going to support this one. Our role, just quickly flash the income slide, I’m not going to talk about it, this is what the town charter says about what our role is. It’s to balance and make recommendations for adjustments. The next one, Connecticut Supreme Court affirming that role that we do have a different role than the other 3 boards, we have to come up with some sort of balance to match revenues that we think we’ll likely raise. This is obviously the fight; we have to balance spending with the taxes that pay for them. We don’t have a lot of options; we’ve referred to this in previous years. The state does not allow towns a local income tax, a local sales tax, can’t have taxes on tobacco or alcohol what have you. And frankly, I think that’s good. Because the towns are the only level of government that are really forced to live within their means and look to the residents directly to put up whatever extra cash is needed. You just can’t automatically, the state did it last year, they raised just about every tax in sight. The feds are arguing about tax increases. Here we don’t have those luxuries, we have 1 tax we can go to and that’s the property tax. (Next Slide) We have non-property tax sources and the property tax.  (Next Slide) This is interesting, looking at the non-property tax first; we raised 9.9 million dollars for that in the proposed budget. You’ll notice that’s a very nice increase. 1 million, 1.5 million dollar increase in the non-property tax revenue stream over what we’ve had in the past. Part of that is due to the change in the BOE budget from net to gross. There are a lot of revenue streams that were not counted last year because they weren’t budgeted for the process that we are going through this year. So that winding down in the revolving account and switching from net to gross budgeting does help us there and you’ll notice that the percentage of our non-property tax revenues goes up this year, it’s about 1.2%, so that’s good. That helps us because even though we have to raise the mill rate, the proportion of our revenues coming from the property taxes climbed by another point, .12%, so this change in the budgeting process and accounting for all the revenue streams and the spending that goes with it we still have almost 87.5% of the revenue we need to meet these budget requests relying on the property tax. (Next Slide) The non-property tax, 12.6%of our revenue, see where they come from, some of the changes, charges to current services, that sum will be re-budgeted now to gross, intergovernmental, and some of those state grants that we’re not going to use entirely. But we do jump up for about a minute and a half on this in the non-property tax revenue stream. Now property tax, almost 87.5%. You can see the biggest jump with that comes from the tax on the residents. It’s a huge chunk of our property tax revenue. The one that most everyone sitting in this room is most directly, immediately familiar with when you cut those checks in July and January. We get some from commercial motor vehicle and so forth. The biggest chunk, ¾ of it, comes from the property tax on residential property base. (Next Slide) You can say the trend here is, it may seem counter intuitive, (Inaudible)when you look at the operating budgets here almost 70% of it goes to the education of Avon, 27% contributed to the Town and other non-education related services. The education portion has been bumping up slightly each year due to enrolling changes, etc. (Next Slide) When you look at the education spending, I’m doing this for the Town, the Operating Budget is 50 million, but Mark talked about debt service. A good portion of our debt service, 3.9 million of the 4.5 million, is for education related projects that we are still paying for, school expansions, new school construction. So we look at the Capital Budget (CIP that Mark talked about), there are a lot of BOE projects in that number, about $598,000. When you add all 3 of these categories the operating budget that Gary just talked about, the debt service portion that is related to education spending, and the capital improvement projects that are education related, the total amount of education spending related spending is 55 million, which is (rounded to) 70%. Gary explained that the state figure, per capita per student spending, is a formula that the state develops, I have my own informal formula that I use. I say if you add these 3 things together, the 55 million, and divide in the number of students, we are spending around $16,000 per student by my information account. That chart, I know it’s a state formula, but realize there is more in education spending in Town than shows up in that state formula. (Next Slide) Trying the same approach on the Town side, the Council operating budget is 20 million, there portion of debt service is half a million, capital budget is a little over a million- when you add services to that, 23 million, which is basically the cost to run the rest of the town, it equals about 30% of the budget.  So 70% is roughly education related and 30% is everything else in town. (Next Slide) Talk about the grand list, the bump here is the year following our evaluation. We can see the last couple of years were not quite what they used to be and not likely. Because most of Avon is built up we don’t have room for these 300-400 house developments anymore so we really can’t go to grand list growth to charge to the rest going forward. It’s nice to see the trend going up as the overall economy picks up, but grand list growth is not going to be the big factor that we had in the past. (Next Slide) Just a couple of statistics, the mill rate increase I told you is 3.55%. It’s higher than the chain in the CPI for one-year change. (Next Slide) The unemployment rate in Avon has dropped slightly which is a good sign but it is still much higher than it usually is in Avon. We are still over 5% unemployment but it’s better than where we were last year. (Next Slide) These are just some comparisons, just like the state formula for education; this is a state formula that tries to equalize state taxes. You can see our equalized mill rate is 16.3, the only one lower than that in our area is Farmington, they have the advantage of Westfarms mall and those office complexes along I84. With our second lowest in the Farmington Valley mill rate, combined with Gary’s statistics at the end of his presentation shows you that we are doing a very efficient job, very effective job at providing good services both education and non-related. (Next Slide) This you can look at, you can go on the website, avonaccessor.com, and plug in your property tax address and figure out, it’s set up now to reflect if the mill rate goes up 3.55%, and you can figure out your taxes. (Next Slide) The next step, we’ll take a couple comments tonight, at the end of this presentation. Then, under the charter, what it says is we have to have a public hearing to confer with the other 2 boards, we usually call that the budget workshop. The workshop will take place Wednesday night, here at 7:00pm. We’ll then make any decisions we are going to make about any budget adjustments. May 7th is the Town Meeting, that used to be when the budget was voted on but that’s when we’ll present what the new budget numbers will be and then the referendum is May 16th here at the Senior Center. So that’s it, that’s the Fiscal side of all of this. While we are getting the lights back on, etc. I’ll go over the ground rules again for speaking. You must be a citizen, a tax payer or an elector. You must be at least 18, registered to vote, be a tax payer, U.S. citizen and own property Please when you come up, we’ll ask you to line up along this wall on my left, speaking will be here in the middle, please give your name, your street address here in Avon, and Steve will keep track of your time of 3 minutes. People who would like to speak please start lining up here. Reminder to watch the cards, when you see the yellow card you have about 1 minute, the red card means you have about 10 seconds.  

6.      PUBLIC SPEAKERS 

George Royster- 189 Deercliff Rd
I’m a voter and a taxpayer and I’ve lived in town for about 15 years. I would like to suggest that the town that the town is getting to a position where it is not living within its means. It is not living within the taxpayer’s means.  What the town does, and what a lot of towns do is they just increase the mill rate and they just increase the taxes on the citizens to pay for whatever it is that the boards have decided to pay for. Obviously the BOE has worked on this extensively, Mr. Mala, the superintendent, that’s normal. They have come up with a budget, a suggestion that is basically Mr. Mala’s budget suggestion.  All of this is normal, all of this is the way towns work. I was on the Town Council in Glastonbury, I was on the Board of Education for 6 years in Glastonbury, I think I know how these things work. But, you can’t let it get out of control and it’s getting out of control here in Avon, taxes are just going up, up, up, up. But the economy is going down, down, down. And there are a lot of people unemployed and I think that the Board of Finance and Town Council and other responsible boards in Town need to rethink their position of increasing taxes year after year after year and increasing budgets year after year after year because people feel like they are entitled to it and that they should have more money for education or whatever it is every single year. That’s really not practical anymore. It’s going up to a point where people just can’t afford it and you’re all taxpayers in town, we’re all taxpayers, we all want the same thing. We all want quality education, we all want a good environment but the education system is 80% so that’s where I focus my attention. 507 employees going up 2.9%, I think the educational budget should go down 2%. That’ll save 2 million dollars on that budget. I have a feeling if you ask the superintendent of schools to reduce his budget by 2 million dollars that he could do it and I bet it wouldn’t reduce the quality of education in Avon. Thank you.


Diane Carney- 36 Rosewood Rd.
Once again, we here in Avon are faced with a proposed tax increase that is caused primarily by a Board of Education budget. It is a budget that is bloated with overly generous employee raises. Why should I be forced to pay an increase in my taxes and get next to nothing in return? My street is so patched that it looks like a jigsaw puzzle. The senior center desperately needs updating and expanding. We need to upgrade our fire and rescue services including relocating fire stations to more efficient water sources. It seems to me that there is an unequal focus on who gets services in town. I realize that it is important to the school system but not when it deprives others of services they are also entitled too. The Avon BOE feels it necessary to provide such exorbitant pay and benefit packages to their employees and if they could justify that they need to employ 36 school administrators, then they should be willing to pay out of a budget that does not increase my tax rate.  Thank you.

Florence Stahl- 2 Sunset Trail
Reasonable people might disagree on ideology, but there are some undeniable facts. Avon students do well by any area standards. Avon employees are paid well by any area standards. Avon public education is funded well by any area standards. Do we strive to do better? Of course we do, but given the economic realities everywhere, including Avon, we want our best efforts to be sustainable. According to our superintendent of schools, about 89% of the BOE new money request, approximately 1.4 million dollars, is committed to compensation or contractual increases. Not new programs, not new enrichment opportunities, but agreed upon contracts and increases in health insurance costs. Look, it’s not easy to stand up here and criticize the public education system and our great employees without seeming disrespectful and unappreciative, but it would take willful blindness not to see where this trend is leading us. The grand list is like a tide going out farther and farther every year exposing the permanent rocks of commitment and death. It’s not so much that our tax base is shrinking, it’s that it isn’t expanding and with evaluation starting in October, it’s unlikely the tax base will produce significant new revenues if at all. Here’s what it comes to, almost all increases in the mill rate are to cover salary increases and to cover the cost of health insurance benefits and their families. If raising property taxes meant that someone wouldn’t have to sleep out in the cold or go hungry that’s one thing, but here in Avon what we really have is a massive transfer of wealth. The truth is, there is no real shared sacrifice. Another fact, values of homes have gone down while taxes have steadily gone up. It’s not that we don’t have enough revenue to run the town and pay our employees, we do.  It’s the amount of increases in compensation and health care cost that are draining the oxygen out of the budget. We cannot change arbitration and union practices, but by recommending budgets that continue to exceed prudent benchmarks, we are complicit in shaping trends that are harmful to our town. We ask the BOF to consider this in their deliberations. We don’t have an unlimited supply of money, and one group cannot float above the fray, not without making life much more difficult for a substantial number of residents of all ages.

Richard Maine- 42 Far Hills Drive (Statement was very hard to hear)
Last year I wrote a letter to the members of the Board of Finance and to the Council and suggested that in addition to a year over year incremental approach when looking at the town budget, they should reflect on what’s occurring in the United States right now and its restructure, especially in the state of Connecticut and take a broader perspective on what’s coming in the future years. I would make that same request again this year because if nothing in the last year there’s growing problems in the world of finance. There’s also a nice list of innovative ideas where giving towns leadership besides to get ahead of the curve they can figure out how to solve this problem. The problem is we’re a mature town with a full population facing a re-evaluation we’re almost certain we’re (Inaudible)the grand list as opposed to maintaining the grand list. All within in a state that’s had 24 consecutive quarters where that job brought us. So if you feel a little bit like a sheep being led to the edge of a cliff, we just ask you to take that lens off your camera, (Inaudible), but could this town, in the context of what’s happening in the state of the country, and look out a few years, and I don’t believe you’ll be able, in good conscience, recommend ANY increase at all to the existing budget. I believe there are more than adequate ways of realizing significant savings without in any way having (Inaudible) necessary services. I really appreciate your thinking on this seriously and I think there’s enough history in this town of good risk management historically and I’d like to see that stand up and face this challenge head on. Thank you.

Susan Henneberry– 488 Huckleberry Hill Rd.
First, I’d like to thank each and every town employee in Avon for making this a wonderful town in which to live and raise a family. Our mill rate is low and our quality of life is high. While I hope this will continue to be the case, I expect life will be a bit more expensive here in Avon just as it is in the rest of the world. The people of Avon are very fortunate to have a voice in this budget process. As much as we would like to keep our taxes low, we must not be naïve about the fact that the cost of existing services are going up. There are many outside pressures on our Town’s operating budget. The cost of employee health benefits are increasing, new education mandates in the state are requiring an increase and demand for technology in our schools, and local tax payers are left to foot the bill on decisions made outside of our town. If we chose not to increase our taxes to cover these increased costs, we must accept diminished services and decline our quality of life. The budget presented here this evening is responsible and includes efficiencies. If the Board of Finance names it desirable to produce the budget, I expect and hope that they will provide Avon residents with their rationale for doing so. I just would like to ask one question. I’m curious how your calculations for calculating the cost of student net capital spending would include use of the high school for a shelter this last October.

Thomas Harrison: That’s a separate issue entirely.  The Town has designated the High School to be the shelter, which was not a BOE decision. The costs for that are going to be, they have been submitted to FEMA and we are reasonably confident in getting those, plus the other costs back at 75% of the cost to us. So that cost will be, although the BOE had the initial expense, they will be reimbursed.

Susan Henneberry: I’m clear on the recovery of the cost, my question was how you came to the calculation of the per pupil expenditure compared to the State’s Department of Education.

Thomas Harrison: That’s not included.

Susan Henneberry:  I wasn’t misinterpreting what you said.

Thomas Harrison:  What I included in my calculation was the operating budget request, the portion of debt service that’s been towards school construction projects and the portion of the Capital Improvement Program that was to pay for new projects.

Susan Henneberry: Exactly. And the construction piece would be the gymnasium that housed our shelter.

Thomas Harrison: Yes, if that’s what you were inquiring I’m sorry I misunderstood you.

Susan Henneberry: I think you’re misleading us in that, the state department of education factor of how they fine the per pupil expenditures accepts the fact that this is an asset to the whole community.

Thomas Harrison: Oh, there’s no question about it.

Claire Henderson- 1 Keystone Circle
As a retiree, I live off my income. I’m a dinosaur. I left a corporation so I have a private pension; there aren’t many of those around anymore. Mine isn’t big, and never in 17 years have I received an increase. I get some social security, sometimes a modest increase and income generated by a modest amount of principle, currently negligible. I pride myself in paying all monthly and annual bills on time from that state of income. If I invade my precious income it is with a lot of thought and caution and I know any deduction in principle reduces my future stream of income. But now after 33 years in Avon the tipping point has been reached. Another entity is now invading my principle, property taxes. They have reached a point that they exceed my ability to pay from my income resources previously enumerated. Something is wrong with this picture. If I can substitute, cut and eliminate, so can Avon. It’s not up to me to tell you how and from where, but cuts must be made. Thank you.

Joe Bartosiewicz- 5 Colby Way
I’ve been here for about 6 years. I used to live in a little town called Thomaston. I’m a certified financial planner and I’ve been doing that for 32 years. I’m writing a book with 1 of the top 5 economists in the country. It’s coming out in about a year. It’s called, “State and Federal Employees, the Real Bitch”. I did a financial plan with 10 state and federal employees, 3 of which are teachers, and I compared them to what Obama considers “rich”, a person making $250,000 a year. We went back 35 years and started with the average teacher going back to the late 70’s, mid 70’s to now. I compared them to a self-employed person who started out about that making $250,000 now. We compared to the teacher getting the benefits of about $20,000 in health insurance and paying health insurance and then putting about 7% in their pension and I compared the self-employed person, a private sector person putting all his money into investments, as much as he could into his SEPRIA. At the end of 35 years, at a calculation of about 5.5%-6% a year, that person who is considered “rich” has 1.6 million dollars. The average teacher though who only made about $93,000-$98,000 with a benefit package has a pension or a 401K of 3.3 million dollars. Technically the teacher is richer than the guy that is making a quarter of a million dollars. The average teacher made 2 million dollars over 35 years, paid approximately $160,000 in taxes, approximately $26,000 in state taxes and put in $140,000 into a teacher’s pension plan making 3-3.5 million dollars. There’s not one person out here who has an IRA or a pension plan whose private sector who has a 3-4 million dollar IRA or a 401K. So in this respect, one thing I would look at is the time worked, the average teachers makes 2 million dollars while their working, 3.5 million if they live until their 85, add them together and they make 5.5 million dollars, divide that by 35 years and the average teacher is making $160,000 per year for the time worked. That’s more than the average doctor, more than the average lawyer, that’s more than the average nurse, that’s more than the average top professionals. So teachers are technically rich. Thank you.

If you want the financial plan I can give it to you.

Linda Merlin– 48 High Gate Drive
I did not write a prepared speech like I frequently do and I wasn’t sure I would talk but I just wanted to make a few comments. My last child is graduating from the high school this year. I am now, according to one of the speakers who spoke earlier, are joining the ranks of those who pay taxes and receive next to nothing in return. But I don’t look at it that way. I’m part of this community and I think there’s nothing more important than doing my share to invest in this community. I also think I get an awful lot in return in educating children of this community whether they’re my children or not. I think the BOE and Gary Mala have done an amazing job with the budget this year and when you think about some of the fights we’ve had in previous years, this budget is so responsible and does everything it needs to do and I totally support it. Again, I think there is nothing more important than the education of our children and the future of this community and I hope you guys will not cut the budget any.  Thanks.

Thomas Harrison: Thank you Linda.

Steve Hunt- 12 Roaring Brook Rd.
I grew up in this town, lived here essentially a majority of my life. I live in the house that I was born in. I did go to the Avon School’s until fourth grade until which I was removed and went to catholic school, which worked out very well for me. Nor do I have any children of my own so essentially I guess I’m one of the people reduced to paying for everyone else. As a health insurance agent, which is what I do for a living, I take particular note in the percentage of increase in the medical benefits. It should be noted that the medical benefits paid to people are done so pre-taxed. Meaning those benefits come to them and they never pay income tax, so our previous gentleman’s description of what is and what is not “rich”, interestingly, when you receive those extra benefits, which are probably $20,000-$30,000 a year in many cases, you pay no income tax on them. When I go to one of my clients with an 8-9-10% increase, you can believe half of that increase gets passed on to the employee. Anybody in this room has noticed that their co-pays go up, their deductible goes up, out of pockets, things get adjusted, because we have to. Our President calls for a shared sacrifice. I’m a health insurance agent and my pay has been cut somewhere between 20 & 30% overnight, as of January 1, 2011, as a result of mandated reductions from the federal health insurance. If I can take a 20-30% pay cut, which I will endure for the good of America, for the good of Avon, for the good of our state, for the good of all of us. It would not be asking much for the people, and I know that this particular pay raise was part of a 3-year agreement, and everybody should remember that we made this agreement 3 years ago, but much the chagrin of a few of us, so they should be paid. But they should remember next time when we come around with these things, asking for a pay freeze or a 2 year waiting freeze, in the greatest economic downturn that we’ve seen since the Great Depression, is not really asking a lot. Thank you.

Mitchell Piper- 129 Stagecoach Rd.
Avon students, I want to talk a little bit about testing and some of the comments that are made about it. Avon students do very well on standardized testing. However, some of the top Universities in the United States no longer require standardized test scores. It’s a fact that the single largest contributor to high standardized test scores are not the educators, not the extra classes but it is the educational and economic level of the parents in the community. According to Hartford magazine, Avon once again has the highest income per capita of any town in the Farmington Valley. Yes we have high-test scores, and that’s no surprise. Avon also has the lowest property taxes of any town in the Farmington Valley, possibly with the exception of Farmington as you point out there are resources that we don’t have. In keeping our taxes low, we hear a lot of seniors get up and say their services are not what they would like.  We also have students; I know as parents, we spend on our students about an extra $3,000 a year for fees for our schools. I consider those a tax, as a parent I consider that I am being taxed more than a non-parent because of all the fees we have to pay for; fieldtrips, drama, sports, for anything you want our kids to do we pay extra for it. So, personally, I look at that as I am already being taxed higher as a parent than as somebody without students. And finally, I’d just like to say, that I didn’t grow up in Avon. I’ve been here since 2004 and I like this town a great deal. I grew up in the mid-west. Two of the things that were revered in the mid-west are students and seniors. And I think it’s really sad that every year we get people up here wanting more and more for schools and we get seniors up here wanting less and less for schools. In my opinion this town has the resources to provide adequately for our student and to provide services for those that are poor in the community, those that are unemployed, AND for our seniors. We need as a community to stop choosing between the people that live in town and the students. Thank you.

Robin Schwartz- 88 Harris Rd.
Thank you all for your hard work. All the presentations were excellent to me so that this year we are kind of playing catch up.  I really feel that over many years past there have been many cuts that were made (inaudible). I really think we are playing catch up in areas and I think the budget is very fair the way it is and I would be very happy to support it. Thank you for listening.

Change Tape

????
…unless you do something about the homestead extension. I mentioned this last year to Mark and I think it should be addressed. The homestead extension is not generous in Avon. It would be a way to solve the problem for people who are used to the school system, a number of people could afford to pay the taxes, they could take the increases and (inaudible) the old people with our fixed income would not have to experience an increase in their taxes. There should be a cap at age 70, property taxes should cap, no further increases, let the young people who are using the school system, pay it. The second part is, I’m concerned that the infrastructure in the Town of Avon is failing. The system is not adequate, it’s not being prepared and they’re budgeting $300,000 for an entire town. It’s an inadequate expenditure. I personally have asked the town 2 years ago to repair our road. They have done nothing; the roads are deteriorating and will have to be totally replaced.  There should be a maintenance program in place that should be addressed. Town says they’ll do it but it’s never been done. If you want to increase the taxes, increase the service to the old people, you have to do something about the homestead extension. Thank you.

Paula Schwartz- 26 Buckingham Rd.
I really want to thank the BOF and the BOE. In the year of increasing demands on both groups, I think this budget is a very reasonable increase for all of us and I think, I’m a little saddened to hear the blame put on teachers and put on things that we don’t have as much control on as we think. I think there are other issues that we really have to look at. BOE and BOE’s all over the country are being asked to meet mandates that cost money, which cost a lot of money. Special education mandates, mandates in terms of services to students. Having served as a school administrator and teacher for many years, I think the jobs of our principles are way beyond what it was in 1985 when I first became a school administrator.  There are tremendous amounts of pressure on us both legally and in the services we have to provide to all students. I think Avon’s done a wonderful job. But I hate to think that this community believes that it can’t support its schools to the level that it has. I think you can. I’m very proud to live here. I’ve lived here since 2003 and I chose to live here. I’m raising my 3 grandchildren here with my son and his family, this town means a lot to me and I think we all have a responsibility to support our schools. They are our future and it is not on the backs of other citizens. I think our kids at our high school help our senior citizens, we try to do many things to try to help all the people in our community and I’m really tired of hearing people denigrate the work that we do in education. I’m very proud to be an educator, I’m very proud to live in this town and I hope you will support the budget on both levels, both on the town side and on the school side. Thank you.

Peggy Roell: I just wanted to recognize as my other role, besides being BOE, my husband is the scoutmaster for the boy scouts in town and we have some of the boy scouts here in uniform. (Applause) These young men are all here because they are working on their citizenship in the community merit badge, which is one of the required merit badges for Eagle, and I’m proud to say that I am co-leading that badge with Steve Bartha, our Assistant Town Manager, who is an Eagle Scout himself.

Thomas Harrison: We recently saw Steve in his uniform. (Laughter)

Peggy Roell: It’s the same one from High School. No it’s not! (Laughter)

Mark Zacchio: I didn’t recognize the council when I first gave my presentation, I apologize. I just want to recognize the council here, David Pena, Christopher May, Pam Samul and Doug Evans.

Thomas Harrison: Thank you all for coming and those of you who spoke for providing very positive and helpful comments, suggestions and observations. We will now adjourn this meeting. Thank you.