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Finance Committee Meeting Minutes
4/23/14
10 – 10:30am
Present: Dan Moriarity, Donald Clawson and Stanley Ross
Also present for parts of the meeting: Melissa Noe and Barbara Gauthier
This meeting was called to review the budget in preparation for Friday night’s informational meeting.
- The Committee agreed that the best way to answer questions regarding the budget would be to deal with each section of the budget instead of going through it line by line. For example the Finance Committee would ask if there are any questions on any of the budget line items within the 100 accounts, 200 accounts and so on and then they would answer any questions with regards to any of the monetary special articles.
- M. Noe informed the Committee that the number for the snow and sand overage at the 9:15am special town meeting will need to be amended as the Director of Operations has not been provided with all of the reports needed as the Accountant and Treasurer are still working on correcting mistakes within these accounts.
- Article 2 on the special town meeting warrant at 9:15am is administrative to cover the payment already made for FY14. Article 3 rescinds a vote taken at the December special town meeting and Article 4 is the correction of that rescinded article. Article 5 is to amend special legislation to address the AG’s comments with regards to the article that was amended and approved at an earlier special town meeting.
- There will be 2 debt exclusion questions on the ballot at the elections on May 6th.
- Items on the annual town meeting warrant that may have holds placed on them were discussed and the reasons behind the FY15 requests were discussed:
- Salaries: Don did not feel that the Finance Committee has anything to do with justifying the decisions made behind salary increases or non-increases because these were decisions made by the Select Board. Stan disagreed as they are money issues.
- $5,000 increase to the Sergeant salary. This additional money was added to the Sergeant’s salary and was taken from the FY15 requested budget for Police Expenses which is now level funded. It was noted that the decisions made with regards to the $5,000 increases proposed to the Chief and Sergeant’s salaries were not approved by the Select Board (2 to 1 not in favor) nor did the Finance Committee agree on the proposed increases.
- Line 124 Temporary Employee was raised to cover the additional help in getting the books straightened out in the Accountant and Treasurer’s Office.
- It was discussed that the reason why the Accountant and Treasurer salaries were being level funded was due to the fact that the people in the positions are new and because there has been so many issues within both of those departments. The reason that the 3rd highway member position isn’t being increased is because that position is also new. Discussion ensued as to why the Building Inspector, Sanitary Inspector and other part time positions were not receiving raises and it was decided to let the Select Board answer any questions that come up.
- The Committee discussed why the Town Clerk and Tax Collector salary increases are more than the other employees are receiving. The Town Clerk was increased by $1,000 to acknowledge all of the work she has been doing to get the office running properly which was offset by decreasing the Assistant Town Clerk line item. When it was realized that this increase would make it so that the Town Clerk who has been in this position for 1 year would be making more than the Tax Collector who has been here for several years and has been doing an excellent job it was agreed to also increase that salary.
- There are 2 lines for budget item 197, it was explained that last year these 2 were listed on the warrant as one item but for more transparency it was broken out into 2 items this year. The same goes for line item 610.
- Special article 10 will need to be decreased from $15,000 to $8,000 per Barbara Gauthier because the 12 & 13 abatements haven’t been done yet and Barbara doesn’t think we will have $15,000.
- The Committee requested that M. Noe make 30 copies of the warrant and the levy worksheets for the informational meeting.
Submitted by,
Melissa Noe, Executive Secretary
Via audio recording
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