MINUTES
WATERTOWN TOWN COUNCIL
BUDGET PUBLIC HEARING
WATERTOWN HIGH SCHOOL AUDITORIUM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, 2002, 7:00 P.M.
PRESENT: Elaine Adams
Lee Archer
Raymond Hebert
Robert Kane
Jean King
Raymond Primini
Paul Rinaldi
Paul Valenti
Richard Wick ABSENT: None
OTHERS PRESENT: Scott Baclawski, Board of Education
Charles Beliveau, Operations Manager, Board of Education
Gina Calabrese, Board of Education
Charles Frigon, Interim Town Manager
Amelia Grover, Finance Director, Board of Education
Frank Nardelli, Assistant Town Manager/Finance Director
Phillip Pelosi, Assistant Superintendent of Schools
John Ramos, Superintendent of Schools
MaryAnn Rosa, Board of Education
Victor Vicenzi, Board of Education 1. Call Meeting to Order
Mr. Archer, Chairman, called the meeting to order at 7:15 p.m.
Mr. Wick read aloud the Notice of Budget Public Hearing as follows:
FISCAL"NOTICE OF BUDGET PUBLIC HEARING YEAR 2002-2003 BUDGETS
TOWN OF WATERTOWN
CONNECTICUT
The Legal Voters of the Town of Watertown and those eligible to vote in Town Meetings are hereby WARNED AND NOTIFIED of a Budget Public Hearing to be held on Wednesday, July, 10, 2001 at 7:00 p.m. at the Watertown High School Auditorium, 324 French Street, Watertown, Connecticut to hear comments on the following Fiscal Year 2002-2003 budgets.
Watertown Town Council
Budget Public Hearing
July 20, 2002
Page 2
Dated at Watertown, Connecticut this 3rd day of July, 2002.
_____________________________
Lee Archer, Chairman
Watertown Town Council
RETURN OF WARNING
TOWN OF WATERTOWN
NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING
I hereby certify that on July 3, 2002 I left a duplicate copy of the attached Notice of Public Hearing, Town of
Watertown, Connecticut, with Virginia Stewart, its Town Clerk.
I further certify that on July 3, 2002 I caused a copy of said Notice of Public Hearing to be published in the Town Times, which newspaper has a substantial circulation in said Town on July 4, 2002.
I further certify that on July 3, 2002 I caused to be set upon the signpost or other exterior places nearest the office of the Town Clerk and all other places and signposts designated by the Town, a written copy of said Notice of Public Hearing signed by the Town Manager of the Town of Watertown.
I further certify, that all the above acts were done at least five (5) days before the holding of the Public Hearing on July 10, 2002.
Dated at Watertown, Connecticut this 3rd day of July, 2002.
_____________________________
Charles A. Frigon
Acting Town Manager
TOWN CLERK'S CERTIFICATON AS TO
NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING AND RETURN OF NOTICE
I hereby certify that the attached Notice of Public Hearing and the foregoing Return of Notice of Public Hearing are duly recorded in the records of the Town of Watertown, CT and that Lee Archer was Chairman of the Watertown Town Council on the date the Notice was signed and that Charles A. Frigon was Acting Town Manager on the date the Return of Notice was signed.
Dated at Watertown, Connecticut this 3rd day of July, 2002.
_____________________________
Virginia Stewart, Town Clerk"
Watertown Town Council
Budget Public Hearing
July 10, 2002
Page 3
Mr. Archer: Time is the second showing of the proposed Town budget. Some people even up to a few minutes ago were asking why we would have a Public Hearing on this again, and the reason why is because this is representative government. We are supposed to be representing the will of the people. The last budget was presented and defeated, therefore we come back with another proposed budget. The last time we had this Public Hearing there were exactly 6 people from the Town in the room; tonight by my count we have about 60 which is a 1,000% improvement. At the last Public Hearing no one from the public came to the microphone and said this is not the budget for us, you should go back, rework it, and bring it up again. Tonight we're hoping to get some input from you folks on what we're going to explain to you. I say explain instead of show; at the last Public Hearing we had a run at the slide show that made all of us very clear and as easy to understand as possible. We're having one technical problems here with the projector, this is kind of an old projector, but we still have the same presentation, but Rob Kane, the Chairman of our Finance Subcommittee is going to get up and do the best he can of explaining what is on the slides. Rob will go through what the previous budget was that was taken to Referendum since I think it's a good starting point for everyone to understand exactly what was (inaudible) and then move on to a proposed budget from that point.
Mr. Kane: Thank you, Lee. Basically on April 16th we came up with a proposed budget that the Finance Subcommittee had worked diligently on, and I just want to talk about that really quickly because there were only 6 people in the room and probably most of those were Town employees or ourselves, so I just wanted to go over it really quick.
Initially the Town budget was $18,275,320 for year 2001/2002. The proposed this year was $18,792,216, a difference of only $516,896, a total increase of only 2.83% in the one year period. The Board of Education budget, 2001/2002 was $26,925,036. 2002/2003 $28,002,000, a difference of $1,077,000 basically or a 4% increase. The combined budget for 2001/2002 was $45,200,000; this year 2002/2003 our proposed was $46,794,000 a total increase of only 3.53%. That's it, 3.53% was in the increase there. The mill rate of course would have increased 1.25 mills at that point. What does this mean? What does a mill rate mean? What does that mean to you guys? What does that mean to the taxpayers of the Town? Property taxes are calculated by the mill rate; 1 mill equals $1.00 for each $1,000 of assessed value. A 25.81 mill rate equals $25.81 for each $1,000 of assessed value. Let's say you have a home assessed at $100,000. 2002/2003 our proposed budget, $100,000 would be $25.81 or $2,581 in taxes for a home that is assessed at $100,000. Compared to last year, when the mill rate was 24.56 that would mean an increase to that person for $125.00.
Let's talk about increases in surrounding towns. Remember I said 3.53% was our goal.
Waterbury: 31%
Seymour 12%
Thomaston 5.2%
New Milford 4.8%
Bethlehem 4.2%
Middlebury 3.6% - their mill rate is 32, much higher than ours
Again this is a very good, lean budget, it really is. 3.5% compared to surrounding towns that I just mentioned which is very comparable to ours is really much lower in comparison. Now why the increase? Why 3.5? There are three reasons really:
§ Inflation, fixed costs rise, it's just a, we all know that in our daily lives.
§ Necessity as far as capital expenditures, and I'll go through those in a second.
§ Costs increase beyond our control.
Fixed costs would include salaries, utilities, insurance and maintenance of buildings. All of these things, I'm sure you can see in your own lives and business have increased. These are fixed.
Capital expenditures – vehicles, we have a great plan in place with the Street, Highway, Police and Fire Departments where we can replace vehicles. We have a plan to replace vehicles, actually it was put in place many years ago, so previous Councils could take credit for that, but it's a great plan where they have the ability to replace vehicles on a pattern, on a time schedule, so if something does go wrong with one of the vehicles we don't have to hurry or scramble to buy a new vehicle and have this huge increase all of a sudden, so it's a nice put in place plan. Roads – we have to take care of our roads. We all know that those need upkeep all the time, especially with the Winters we have. Machinery – I believe there's a backhoe in here that we need to replace that's from the 1970's. Obviously that is needed to do the necessary work we have to do. Computers – this is 2002. For the most part they work very well; we'll discount this one right here, but obviously we need computers, we can't live without computers, we can't run our daily lives or businesses without computers. These need to be upgraded.
What costs increased are out of our control? Rising municipal insurance costs. I hate to mention 9/11 but that's a fact of life. Insurance costs are going through the roof, and that's one of the reasons, not all of it, but that's one of the reasons, and there are others that insurance costs in municipalities are just rising beyond our control. Waste collection fees are rising and a State mandated Plan of Development. We've got State mandates that just come down that we have to follow and abide by and these are just taking effect.
Let's look at these more carefully.:
§ Municipal insurance costs – increase of $102,795 for a 20% increase in the Town budget
that came from insurance costs.
§ Garbage collection fees - $124,754 or 24% of the increase.
§ Plan of Development, State mandated is $50,000 or 10% of the increase.
These costs, again, are beyond our control and take up a good percentage of this budget.
Those 3 expenses that I mentioned, I wish these could be highlighted up there, cause it really tells the story and it's nice to visualize these things that I'm talking about, but account for $272,549 in new expenses. All new expenses. That's 54% of the Town's Budget increase came from new expense. Now I know in your own lives, your own businesses, if you have 54% of your budget came from new expenses, what would you do? They're unavoidable.
Now if you take actually, this is a good point, and again I wish you could see it, but the Town budget increase, minus these 3 items, take these 3 items and pull them aside, is only 1.31%. That's it. So these are not extravagant budgets, these are not inflated budgets, these are legitimate figures. There's a 1.31% increase if it weren't for those items in the Town budget.
Capital expenditures – I talked about the backhoe, it's 27 years old 1975 that would make it, I guess. It's been rebuilt twice since 1975 and of course it's no longer worth fixing. It's used for Town construction projects, roads, sidewalks, I mean this is a necessity, something that the Town necessarily needs.
Fire truck, Fire car, Car #3 is a 1997 pickup, it's unsuitable for current needs. Some of you are Volunteer Fireman in the room, if you see these guys work, they do an unbelievable job, but they really need to get access to their equipment, respond to emergencies, respond to something immediately, and if you saw this truck, it's just not feasible for what the Fire Department needs to do. If we're talking about personal safety and issues like that, it's really important that these guys have the proper tools, machinery, and vehicles to do what they have to do to protect our Town. This vehicle, although it may not be used for the Fire Department, will be used in the Parks and Recreation Department. We're not throwing it away or wasting it, we're going to use it in the Parks and Recreation Department where they need a vehicle.
There's a dump truck that we need – 17years old. There is a lot going on, there's a lot of work to it, it gets beat up, I mean 17 years is a long time for a dump truck, but the engine is barely hanging on and that's why we need this new vehicle. It's incredible. You guys can talk personally if your want and ask questions about these vehicles
Police Vehicles- we need 3 new patrol cars. The Police vehicles obviously, one thing that came to our attention in the Finance Subcommittee meeting, is not just mileage when you look at a car, but hours. These cars maybe don't put a lot of mileage on them, I'm sure they do put a lot of mileage on them, but compared to you and I when we go to work every day or whatever, but they're on all the time, 24/7 they are running, they are being used, so hours on a vehicle are very important as well and these are really getting worn down. We're looking for one S.U.V. Now this past Winter wasn't very bad at all, but then again it's New England, wait a minute and the weather will change, so we know it's going to get worse in the Winter time so we need an S.U.V. Each of these vehicles, actually this answers my own question, they do have over 80,000 miles on it, so they really do have a lot of mileage as well as again the amount of time that they're being used.
Computers – the offices of Town Clerk and Assessor need new computers. The Town Clerk has no computer at all. How many people here have offices without a computer? Not many I bet, and the Town Clerk has none. Obviously if we get these computers it will increase accuracy, increase the efficiency in these Departments and necessity.
We have road and drainage construction, we have different maintenance items, and let me just reiterate that this is a very responsible budget. The Finance Subcommittee worked very hard on this. There are no excessive pay increases. There are no unnecessary capital expenditures. The increase is equal or below the expected increases of surrounding communities and we take into account the current economic conditions that we face.
That was our original presentation back on April 16th I believe, and again, I wish I could show it to you. When we did the original presentation people showed up and no one really knew the true facts of what was in this budget. As I said there are fixed costs beyond our control, there's inflationary things we have to deal with, there's new vehicles and maintenance equipment we need, and this budget is much lower than surrounding towns.
As we all know, the Budget Referendum failed but we feel without maybe proper information out there, but it did, so we came back and we worked with Frank Nardelli who I will refer to if we get too detailed. He's excellent and he helps us out a great deal in this process, but we came back with a couple of other things. We are looking at of course the original proposal, and then a .9 increase which we would do some work, and then of course another one. What we have is some money came through from Anthem Blue Cross stock and it's a demutualization, so there are monies that we have from a sale of stock which total about $400,000. Now legal opinion is that belongs to the Town, so we can say that yes, that is ours, but obviously the money was put in through the employees on their own health benefits and insurance. This money was not available to us at the original time, on April 16th this money was not available. This money came after the fact. We can gamble with that in a way by saying all right, we've got $400,000, let's use it, or we can look at it more responsibly, and I'll have Lee talk about that later.
Worker's Compensation – we found that we can save a little bit of money there, and of course there's the inevitable Fund Balance we can attach money from. Questions on the Fund Balance I'd like Frank to talk about, why towns do that, what's the norm, most of it is State mandated. The State says you have to put money in the Fund Balance and keep money aside for your towns, so there are percentages that we're looking it. If that's the case, in the .9 scenario, which is another scenario we've been working on, we would have to have expenditure reductions on the Town side of $168,000; the Board of Education's side $252,000, for a total of $42,000 in reduction. Now that will take us to a .9 mill increase which would be a 25.46, as opposed to the current 24.56. A lot of that has to do with again the Anthem demutualization, the worker's compensation savings, and then there's another thing. In the proposed budget it was planned for a Town Engineer, and obviously with the Budget failing that person has not started, so there would be some savings in the time that this person would come on in his salary because we don't have that position filled currently so there's some money that we could just transfer from the Town Engineer savings, so that would give us a .9 increase. But again, I'm going to turn it over to Lee because I know you have questions on the demutualization and on what kind of mill rate we should have, and hopefully give input, but I'll turn it over to Lee to speak to those issues and let you guys come up and talk about it.
What I wanted to do originally, that there is a lot of false information out there that the work we did was correct, was just, I'm comfortable with it because I know we did a good job on both sides of the aisle and I know that the Town does a wonderful job, the people that you have sitting up here. Thank you very much.
Mr. Archer: The Anthem Blue Cross stock demutualization, if I was a Wall Street guy I could probably explain it to you, but since I'm not, we're going to let Frank Nardelli take a crack at it, if you would?
Mr. Nardelli: Well when Anthem went to a stock company, all of the towns issued stock and it was based on, as far as Watertown goes, it was based on the amount we were paying for people who were 65 and over, so it wasn't based on if you were co-paying or in a Union or what not, it was based on a premium we paid for people who were 65 and older, and Anthem made a computation as to how many shares the Town would receive. The Town received like 7,000 share of this Anthem stock which we brought to the Council, and the Council basically said sell the stock, which we did, and we put the money aside into a money market fund where it's earning interest. We were waiting to see what happened with the State, because the State also received a lot of money and all the other towns did, we were waiting to see if anyone came forward as far as Unions coming after that money, and at this particular date the Town has not received anything from any Unions putting any claims on this money, and Blumenthal also came out with an option saying basically it's the Town's money, and so has Anthem Blue Cross. We went to a seminar that they performed, and they basically said it's the Town's money, so that money is sitting in a mutual fund right now earning money, so that's why we brought that forward
Mr. Archer: Now Blumenthal's opinion of that was not, I just want to clarify for everyone, his opinion had not been heard yet when we went forward with the first budget
Mr. Nardelli: That's correct.
Mr. Archer: Now I want to make that point because there was a letter in the paper, I can't remember who it was written by, it doesn't really matter, but it suggested, you know, here we go again, you know there's $440,000 that was just sitting around that we didn't tell you about. Well first of all that's absurd. What would be my motivation, or Rob's or Dick's or Jean King's? What would be our motivation to do that? There isn't one. Since the budget was formed and let out of the barn, so to speak, on its way to Referendum, that decision by Blumenthal was made, that still is not an absolute concrete decision, am I correct?
Mr. Frigon: That's correct.
Mr. Archer: I believe it's the Connecticut Teacher's Union?
Mr. Frigon: Yes, it's not a binding decision by Blumenthal, it is the Connecticut Teacher's Association that is or
may appeal Blumenthal's decision, but we feel very confident that the decision would be in our favor.
Mr. Archer: So this is yet another reason why we're having a Public Hearing on this. There's $400,000 in an account that we can cash out and use to lower the mill rate increase. The Connecticut Teacher's Union is considering an appeal to Blumenthal's decision so we could go ahead and spend that, but we have to do it with the caveat that if the Connecticut Teacher's Union prevails in their appeal, we may have to give it back, and that's not something that I personally was comfortable making that decision on my own. That's rolling the dice to some extent, and I felt that input was needed from the public in order to make that gamble. I think that clarifies the Anthem stock.
The other thing to remember is that budgets are fluid. They're very rarely fixed for very long. Everyone here, I
assume, is a homeowner or lives in a home at least, not on the street I hope. You have your own budget, I make
up a budget, I revise it every month because it changes. In October of last year, my furnace was fine. In
November it had to be replaced. I replaced my septic 3 years ago. My kids have braces, things I couldn't have
anticipated certainly when they were born. Everyone has been through these things, and the point is the budget
is a fluid item and from one month to the next it changes. We had the Anthem money and we couldn't use it;
now we have the Anthem money and the opinion from Blumenthal is that we can use it. One month insurance
costs were "x", not they're "y". The important thing to remember is that the budget changes on a constant
basis. All you have to do is spend a few New England Winters to realize that sometimes you get no snow, and
sometimes you get buried. That's going to create differences in the budget; it's a fluid item, it does not remain
stable for very long, and that's why from one budget Referendum to the next the numbers could change. At this
point I'll turn this over to Scott Baclawski who will talk about the Board of Education's budget.
Mr. Baclawski: This is our budget proposal back from the June 4th Referendum so we're bringing this back to you again in an effort to further explain what we had in the budget the last time around to elicit any comments or questions or suggestions as you see fit.
This right here is how the Board of Education budget starts out. This book has every item from our budget listed into object codes, categories, positions, you name it. This has got two proposals in it that we've worked on so far this year, with one cut that was made. We pared that down into a book this size. We put some of the numbers together in an effort to make it more manageable for the Board of Education's Budget Committee to review and to make cuts from, which we have done. That brings us down to this book here, which is what we bring to you.
On the first page of the book is our overall budget summary. The far left hand column is all the objects, these are the categories that we put everything into in order to give it a classification. There's descriptions here of each of the objects. The next column is the 2001/2002 that we're currently getting this year. The next column is the original proposed budget for 2002/2003. The next column is cuts that were made from the Budget Committee from the Board of Education. The next column is when we cut further. When we met with the Town Council's Budget Committee they asked us to go from a 6.52% increase down to a 4% increase, so we cut an additional $677,629. And that brings us to our proposed 2002/2003 budget of $28,002,037, and that was what was put forth in the June 4th Referendum. The next column shows you variances and we're going to put that on the overhead for you and break that down, and the last column gives you percentage of change, either positive or negative for each of the objects that we put forth. (Tape #1, Side A ended – may have missed some.) The last page was major variances.
Variances are differences in cost from last year to this year. If you look across the rows here it gives you a breakdown on Obj. 111 – Certified Salaries. In 2001/2002 our Certified Salaries cost $14,522,534. The projected 2002/2003 Certified Salaries is going to cost us $14,990,313. That is an additional cost of $437,784. Our Certified Salaries come from negotiated contracts, for the teachers, paraprofessionals, custodians, so everybody that has a contact gets paid a raise year to year as deemed by their contract. There's a further breakdown on this of all the categories within the certified salaries, our central office administrators, teachers, there is a line in there for a proposed staff increase. We are requesting 4 new teaching positions and I have an overhead for that I can show you. Our department head coordinator salaries, our school position salaries, our summer school salaries, and our retirement salaries.
The next page on major variances is our Obj. 112 – Non-Certified Salaries. For 2001/2002 it was $3,676,080. With the new contracts that we are obligated to for 2002/2003 that's going to be a cost of $3,961,584. That's a variance of $285,504. There's a further breakdown of this sheet as well. The Non-Certified Salaries consist of custodians, nurses, paraprofessionals, secretaries, a network coordinator, maintenance supervisor, financial service supervisor, director of operations. We have a proposed staff increase of 2 custodian positions. Our hourly teachers, nurse's aides, summer aides, board clerk, call in substitutes, summer maintenance, cleaning person for Munson House, and our budget salary adjustments for non-affiliated personnel which was cut in the 2002/2003.
The next page are major variances for the 2002/2003 budget in several different object codes. Our coaches salaries, our employee benefits, our professional and technical services, our legal counsel, our professional services, utilities, contract repairs, and maintenance. Underneath each one of these objects is a brief description of what's included in this. The coach's salary is what the Board of Education approved for the Athletic Director's salary and we have a new Assistant Cheerleading coach position which is included in this item as well.
Our Employee Benefits again are mandated costs to us. We have to pay social security, medicare, worker's compensation, and blue/cross blue/shield medical care costs out of that object.
The next object, Professional and Technical Services, are testing and evaluation costs, special education costs, and there was money in last year for the Superintendent Search, so there's a reduction in this variance of $5,096.
Our Legal Counsel is what we pay out to have attorneys represent the Board of Education in contract negotiations and different other legal services which we require, such as consultation with regards to special education needs, different student needs, expulsion hearings, etc. We have a $10,000 increase in that line item because of the way we're seeing costs this year, we want to make sure we have plenty of financial coverage in that object.
Our Professional Services, Obj. #30, we have an increase of hockey and Police and Fire for coverage there, professional development for teachers and principals, which is contractual. There is an additional $32,130 in that line item.
Obj. #410 is our Utilities. We see a small decrease in that this year, due to the gas budget for the John Trumbull School. That's a decrease of $5,084 for the proposed 2002/2003.
Our Contract Repairs and Maintenance - we're going to see an increase in our electrical, plumbing and maintenance contract services, the cost of copiers, the elevator maintenance at John Trumbull, fire alarms for the building, the monitoring of security, repairs, maintenance, the trucks, and asbestos abatement.
The next page under major variances we have lease and rental costs, constructions projects, which I have an overhead to show you, pupil transportation which is a contractual cost to us, our property insurance which as Rob stated earlier, we have no control over. Due to the events of 9/11 we're going to see increases in not only our property insurance, but increases in our liability insurance for our buildings.
Obj. 539 – Field and Athletic Trips, Obj. 560, tuition, which we're going to see a little bit of a decrease in, and our travel & conferences which is the conference and travel budget for areas where there was no prior budget, we see an increase in travel allowance for our various administrators and there's an additional $4,730 in that item.
The last page of our variances breakdown we have our instructional supplies line item, textbooks and workbooks, and these workbooks are inclusive of workbooks that students get on an annual basis to use through the school year, but at the end of the year they are brought home with the student or disposed of and need to be replaced for the following year. We also have in here a new math textbook for our elementary schools.
Library and Periodicals – there's a slight increase in that due to the budget cut back in 2001/2002 so we're trying to get some of those funds back up to replace some of the libraries and periodicals.
Obj. #730 – Equipment. There was a cut in that line item so there's a $53,995 less than this current fiscal year.
Vehicles, Purchase of – we put in for the lease of a new maintenance vehicle for our schools. When you came in through the front door there was a red pickup truck out front. That is the vehicle we're looking to replace.
Dues & Fees – a slight increase there.
We made a cut in our budget for Athletics of $21,242.
Now I'm going to give you a quick overview on what we're looking at for new items in the proposed 2002/2003 Board of Education budget. Knowing the items that we discussed in the first object, that Obj. #111, for Certified Staff, we are requesting 4 new teaching positions at the High School. There are various reasons for each one of these positions. As you can see they go from a Social Studies Teacher to a Math Teacher to a World Language Teacher to an English Teacher. The Social Studies Teacher is there because we're going to be implementing a new Civics Curriculum within the High School. The Math and English Teachers are there because we have more students in the classrooms than we have teachers available to make sure that our student class sizes are at an applicable level. We also put in for one World Language Teacher. The High School currently offers French and Spanish, and we don't have enough Spanish teachers to take care of all the students requesting Spanish as their curriculum of choice, so we requested a World Language Teacher to cover the overflow and ensure enough staffing so students have their World Language choice.
We have 2 Non-Certified staff increases in the 2002/2003 budget. We have a request in for 1 Floater Custodian so that we have somebody available to help out when a custodian is out sick, or for or any other reason, we can use this custodian to plug into that position and that way there we can eliminate the majority of our overtime costs in that area. The overtime costs are costing more than hiring a custodian on a full time basis to take care of those overtime issues. The second custodial and maintenance position was for a General Maintenance and Boiler Custodian – Several schools are getting older and we want to ensure property maintenance of the boils and the equipment in these schools so we don't have problems with them further down the road. A lot of the maintenance has been somewhat neglected on some of those boilers and we want to try and get them up to snuff so we don't have major expenditure with boiler replacement.
Construction Projects - Probably the largest portion of our request for this current budget year, the Board of Education is requesting several different things to help us with the upkeep of our schools and improvements in several of the school areas:
Obj. 3450 - Construction. This page shows you a list on the second left hand column of all the items that were requested for the 2002/2003 budget. You can see through the different columns the different cuts that were made over time. The far right hand column are the last things that were remaining that were requested for the 2002/2003 budget. On this page there's just a singular item left that was requested and left it, and we actually made a cut in the overall projected cost of it and that was the paving project for the lower level of the Heminway Park School parking lot. That's the lot that is directly adjacent to Deland Field and that lot is in serious need of paving, and it gets a lot of use during the school year because our school busses enter into the lot and our students get (inaudible) up there and they come in at the end of the day and they get onto the busses at that location, so we felt that was something that we needed to take care of this year as a top priority.
There were other paving projects that were requested, but we tried to do those on a priority basis and the Heminway Park was the top priority paving project.
Unidentified Woman in Audience: Why are you fencing in old Heminway?
Mr. Baclawski: That was a request for one of the areas around the parking lot that was considered an area where children could get into and possibly go down one of the side hills there, but that was cut out at this juncture due to the cost, so it was not included.
Unidentified Woman in Audience: It's being cut out?
Mr. Baclawski: It's not included, correct.
Unidentified Woman in Audience: The fencing project at Judson – is that being cut out also?
Mr. Baclawski: There were some fencing requests for the ball fields that are part of the schools. Some of the ball fields have fencing, but fencing has either been ripped down or beat up by whomever, and there was a request in to replace some of that fencing that had been torn down over the years, but due to financial constraints that item had to be cut so that's currently not in the 2002/2003 proposal.
The next page for construction projects, again on the right hand column we have in there 3 items left on this page. We have one sidewalk paving project at the High School because in front of the High School, the concrete sidewalk has sunk down over time due to settling of the concrete and the ground, and there's currently a gap between the concrete and curbing and we felt it was a safety issue so we wanted to keep that in and get that area paved on the sidewalk so there wouldn't be any kind of injuries there.
Stage lighting controls here at the High School. If you have an opportunity to go back there after, there's a lighting board that's probably original to the school. Unfortunately the plugs and the wires that are used to operate the stage lighting controls are severely antiquated and are in need of replacement. We felt this was a safety issue and we wanted to get a start on the replacement of those items so you can see where it was originally projected for $30,000, but we were able to cut that back to $4,500 due to the different estimates that we got and we left that in as a possibility for the 2002/2003 budget.
The next item here at the High School was the replacement of the intercom system. I believe that system was original to the School and unfortunately it's somewhat intermittent in its availability to be used in certain classrooms. We felt that was a priority issue, a safety issue, because teachers and the office are not able to get in contact with each other. We just recently finished the one at Swift and we wanted to move on and get the intercom replaced at the High School as well.
The last page of our construction projects is a system-wise request. There are 2 items remaining on this page. The first one is a window shade and blind installment for security. Our schools currently undergo what is called a "Code Orange" and this is in lieu of post 9/11 events. The lock down procedure for the schools is meant for safety. If somebody should come into the school or somebody is spotted on the exterior of the school that's considered suspicious we wanted to make sure we had proper security for our building and our classrooms so we left in there for replacement and installation for blinds for security purposes.
The second item on this page that remains in currently is security improvements. This is for Judson, Polk, Heminway, Swift, and Watertown High School. For those of you who have been at John Trumbull, you know that in order to get into the building during the class day, you have to ring in through a buzzer system in order to be allowed entrance into the building. Again that's for security purposes and we wanted to carry that over to these other schools as well so we can start to improve security at our buildings and make sure our students are safe.
The next page is what's called Obj. #730 – Equipment Request Budget. This is again for 2002/2003 which we requested. The far right hand column are items that remain in the budget currently requested. These come from the administrators and the faculty members at the schools requesting equipment to further the curriculums within their facilities, so these items are all forwarded to the Superintendent and go through the budget process as well.
Judson - request for an electronic typewriter
Heminway – request for a 4 double burner electric hot plate
Judson – request for vision screening machine and stand
Heminway – request for one Lab Incubator
The next page, this is kind of detailed, I understand, but I wanted to give you an overview of the smaller items that are in this line item to just give you a quick show on new requested.
Swift - Physical Education Department – Upper Body Fitness Machine (that goes in with the curriculum for the P.E. Department)
Science – Standard (inaudible) Illuminator
Storage for Safety Glasses
The next page is a few items remaining.
High School – Drying rack in Art Room
Music Department - Percussion workstation with accessories
High School - Electrical (inaudible)
6 Electronic Balances for the Science Department
Skeleton
1 Solid State Induction Coil
High School –Industrial Arts – Dual Stage Air Filter
Graphic Arts - 20 Inch Scroll Saw
(Inaudible) for use with the offset press
2 replacement items in here for 95 classroom chairs and 95 classroom desks
1 Shredder
Pitching Machine for Athletics Department
File Cabinet
The next page are System wide on the top
4 Vide Cams
2 Visual Pods
2 Listening Centers
10 Overhead Projection Machines with Carts
4 Projection Machines
The next page has one item remaining for maintenance and grounds:
1 Equipment Trailer ( something that needs to be replaced)
The last page on the Equipment Budget Obj. #730 again is the Maintenance Department is a request for 2 new snow throwers. System-wide the next item down, is our request for computer equipment. Our computer centers are doing very well, but unfortunately some of the equipment is old and becomes antiquated and we need to replace it to keep our curriculums up and running properly. If you run through this item you can see where we started out, where the cuts were made. We went from a $387,040 request and we cut that down to $40,000. Unfortunately there's not a lot of money left in there for the computers we requested from that curriculum teacher, but it's what we have with the other items that all fit into place.
I hope I didn't bore you awful terribly, but you can see this is just a basic overview. We've gone through this for several meetings, looking at each item, making different determinations on what's needed, how badly it's needed, what do we have funds for, what do we have available to us and through other means. Our budget, again like Rob said for the town's Side, for the Board of Education's side is ditto. It's a very comprehensive budget. We did our cuts from our initial proposal of 6.52% down to 4% and we feel that it's a very good budget, we don't feel it's overly excessive, and we feel that we prioritized things in there in a way to make sure that we were able to get certain things done that are truly needed to be done this year. I thank you for your time and I'd be happy to field any questions for you.
Mr. Archer: How many pages were in that budget? I was talking to someone and they said it was 170 plus. How many people are on the Budget Subcommittee?
Mr. Baclawski: 4.
Mr. Archer: How many hours do you figure you spent on that?
Mr. Baclawski: Several.
Mr. Archer: Everyone who works on the Council and the Board of Ed is a resident of the Town; they're all taxpayers. Why the hell would I want to raise my own taxes? It's because I went through the budget and I couldn't find anything else to take out. The last thing I want to do is shell out more money every year.
I'm going to turn this over to the, I'm glad Scott went through so much detail so you can see how much is involved in this thing. It's not an easy process. It's not something that we're all dying to go through a second time, but obviously we will. I'm going to open up the mike and invite everyone to come up. I don't know if everyone will; I'd appreciate as many people as possible to give your opinions on what else should be removed. Scott went through some real, very detailed explanations about what is in the budget, and as citizens of the Town, in the Public Hearing format, you have the right to tell us what to do, so we need your input to come up. I have a couple of comments before that.
Community and what that means – what's a community? Anybody want to take a crack at the definition of a
community? Some people would think it is the infrastructure, the buildings and the roads, some people would
want to say it's the businesses, but none of these things would exist without the people in the community. A
community is a group of people who work together for common goals. Is everyone always going to agree with
each other when defining the goals of the community? No. Of course they're not. It's one of the things though
that makes America what it is, the beautiful, wonderful compilation of everyone's ideas and dreams. 226 years
ago this amazing social experiment began called the United States, and no one can dispute that no matter how
you define success, the single most successful society ever created is ours. So here's a question for you. Are
the needs of Connecticut the same as those of Southern California? Clearly they're not, but I don't see the states
at odds with each other in achieving their specific goals. There are no civil wars going on between the states, it's
been about 150 years since we had that. The community of 50 states seems to coexist without any civil wars,
(inaudible). How about the needs of Bridgeport compared to the needs of Watertown? Are they the same? No,
they're not, and again I don't see any intercity wars going on. There may be inner city wars but there's no
intercity wars going on.
Now how about Watertown? Let's take a look at ourselves for a minute. Within Watertown and Oakville there
are, I hate to say this but it begs saying, there are clearly citizens who have very different, wait a minute, within
Watertown there are clearly citizens who have different needs and goals. That's absolutely clear. One family is
concerned with their kid's education while another is trying to figure out how to mange their retirement income.
But do we coexist peacefully in the spirit of give and take? Do we have the mentality that we can all come to an
agreement on common issues for common good, the real definition of community? I hate to say it but currently
there are some of us in our community who have issues in this area. Some of our citizens define themselves as
(Tape #1, Side B ended – may have missed some). Some of our citizens define themselves as retirees versus
young families. Oakville versus Watertown. Last I checked we are one Town. Oakville and Watertown are
certainly different geographic areas, but the geographic differences (inaudible) make the people in them any
different. We're all members of the same community. Blue Collar versus White Collar, parents of school children
versus empty nesters, have's versus have not's, rich versus poor, you, me, us, them, where does it end? How
about black versus white? (Inaudible) versus Pakistani or Arab versus Israeli? Do we lob mortar shells at each
other to solve our problems or talk about them in the interest of solving them? Which would you rather do.
We are Watertown and everything that is Watertown is yours. Whether you have children in the school system
or not, it is your school system because you are a stakeholder in this community. It's not that school thing over
there if you don't have kids in it. It's yours. You own it. You're a stockholder in it. Whether you use the parks or
not, or use Parks and Recreation Programs or not, it's your Parks and Recreation Department and they're your
parks. You're a stakeholder in the community and those things belong to you. All of the facilities, services, and
amenities of our community and the quality of those have profound effects on your property and home values,
whether you realize it or not. I imagine for must of us our home is our biggest investment. There is an old axiom
about how you should live in the world and not on it. The same is true here. You don't just live here; you are a
stakeholder in the value of the Town; you are a stockholder in Watertown. As long as we define ourselves as
belonging to one group or another, as long as we remain fractured and splintered into opposing subgroups of our
community, you know, Oakville versus Watertown, rich, poor, parents, non-parents of school children, as long as
we fail to come together to solve our community problems as a group of active, constructive, committed citizens
who are willing to work together to find solutions rather than throw rocks, we're not going to move forward and
we're not going to solve our problems, and God help our poor little Town. If you're only going to throw rocks and
not become an active participant in finding solutions then you are a part of the problem.
We'll have Public Participation next. I'm not going to tell you what to say. I'm no going to tell you what you can
or can't say. You have freedom of speech as everyone else does, but I would urge you to bring solutions or
suggestions to the microphone, or at the very least constructive criticism. Be part of the solution. Thanks.
Daniel Zuraitis, 8 Litchfield Road, Watertown, CT 06795
Mr. Zuraitis: I'm speaking just as a concerned citizen and a taxpayer. The question has been asked, why raise
taxes? Many members of W.O.T.A. served on the Council and Boards of Education in this Town. Many of us
have been life long residents here in this Town. The reason we raised taxes when we were on the Council, we
raised taxes in line with the growth of the Grand List. No more, no less. We built schools, we built a lot of things
on bonds. We were responsible to the taxpayers in Town. There are many people in Town that live on fixed
incomes, very low pensions and very low Social Security payments. These people are hurting in this economy.
We had a speaker up here that gave us all of the surrounding towns that had increased in excess of 4%, 8%,
whatever, but he didn't tell us what local towns voted down the budget time after time, as we will have to do
because we can't live within what we (inaudible). Again this Council isn't the first Counci |