February 23, 2016 Minutes

Westport Finance Committee (Fincom)

Meeting Minutes

Westport Town Hall

February 23, 2016

Present: Shana Shufelt (SS), Dick Brewer (DB), Gary Carreiro (GC), Charles “Buzzy” Baron (BB), Tracy Priestner (TP), Mark Carney (MC), Hugh Morton (HM), Karen Powell (KP)

Absent: Bob McCarthy (BM)

Attending: Terry Provencal (TA), Town Accountant

SS, Chair, opened the meeting at 7:00 p.m. with the traditional salute to the flag.

Minutes:

02/09 was presented for approval. GC motioned and BB seconded to approve as amended by DB The vote was unanimous in favor with MC and HM abstaining.

Reports:

Administrator: None

School Building: The committee has rescheduled the regular meeting from Feb 24th

Mar 2nd at 5pm.

Accountant: Distributed updated local receipts for FY16 and reported that the initial cherry sheet shows only an approximate $10k increase for FY17.

Liaison: BB started a brief discussion on the BAG which has not been meeting due to the BOS not supporting the BAG and delegating two members to the group. All were in agreement that the BAG was a great tool in getting the Fincom, BOS and School together to hash out the budget and needs to remain active. BB will attempt to speak to the BOS to try to get them to agree to the BAG and get the budget done.

FY17 Budgets:

Town Clerk: Marlene Sampson (MS), Town Clerk, was in attendance to present the FY17 budget. GC started the discussion mentioning that the budget is mostly level from FY16. There are no current plans to move voting precints.

Elections & Registrars: Joshua Brum (JB), Assistant Registrar and Arthur Caesar (AC), Registrar, along with MS presented the FY17 budget. It is slightly increased from FY16 due to the extra election. It costs approximately $8-10k per election. One change this year is that all poll workers are now town employees instead of outside vendors. This will change their expense to personnel. It also increased their hourly rate to $10. The State is also implementing an early voting for Oct 17th to Nov 5th and this will mean having residents to come into Town Hall to vote online. This will cause an increase in workload for both offices but not sure how much until training on the new procedure. When asked about census, JB stated that it is outsourced and we are getting a discounted postage rate. BB asked about stipends and said that out of the 33 towns he contacted, only one paid stipends to the Registrars. AC said that these are more wages because our registrars are active at the elections and town meetings and voter registration events. GC said that the 33 is just a small sampling and he thinks that there are probably smaller towns than ours that pay much more than we do.

Information Technologies: Keith Novo (KN) and John Cabral (JC) were in attendance to go over the FY17 budget. It has increased greatly due to an increase in maintenance costs. GC asked about Microsoft Office but there are no plans currently to implement this. It was requested through CIPC but removed because of his other request through CIPC for hardware and firmware to increase the internet speed and replace outdated equipment on the server.

Collector: Sue Brayton (SB), Assistant Collector, was in attendance to discuss the budget for FY17. The staffing increase that took place in FY16 was much needed and has greatly improved the timing in the office of processing requests from the public. There will be an additional $300 needed to cover dues and bonding for the Assistant position. Some discussion occurred as to whom is bonded in town and whom is not and why. This is a discussion for the Town Administrator at the next meeting. GC was tasked to send an email to the Administrator to that extent. GC also asked about using a lockbox for payments but SB said the Collector has looked into it and decided it would be more work for the office than a savings. Already the online payments are causing more work as they have to be kept separate from payments received in the office and require several more steps to post and verify. HM asked about tax takings and SB said they are right on track. It usually starts at 120 and dwindles down to about 20 and there a quite a few frequent fliers on the list.

Treasurer: Brad Brightman (TR), Treasurer, was in attendance to discuss the FY17 budget. He started with a line by line discussion of any increase or decrease. There is increased labor with the Affordable Care Act and it includes all school personnel as well as town. There is an increase in advertising costs because an advertisement of land of low value is being planned. There are approximately 14 of these parcels that will be dealt with. Increased costs in his budget is also for the new time and attendance system that was requested by the BOS.

Health Insurance: The estimate is $2,935 mil but SMHG estimates the increase will be around 12 or 14%. GC says that 3% of this is all pharmaceutical costs.

Retirement: The amount assessed is $2,265,333 with is a 6.5% increase or $871.

Life Insurance: The amount for FY17 is stable at $5k which is a 50/50 split with employees.

Medicare: This is flat from FY16.

Unemployment: This budget is down $40k from last year as there are no current plans for a layoff and is based on actual figures from FY15.

Workers Comp: The budget increased $4k but will ask the Town Administrator for an update on this as it is handled by the BOS.

OPEB: This is listed at $150k for FY17 which is up $100k. This discussion will hold for the Town Administrator.

Accountant: TA was in attendance to present the FY17 budget. The only increase is te $12,500 for the OPEB audit which has to be done every two years. Also there has been talk of finding a new auditor and if this happens, the budget of $20k for the current auditors will not be sufficient since these auditors having been giving us a great deal for years.

SS finished the meeting by going over the upcoming dates and reiterating the fact that liaisons need to meet with their departments before coming to the Fincom meeting. March 10th is the deadline for all warrant articles to be given to the Fincom by the BOS and March 31st for final reports on the budgets from the BOS and the School. The school is coming to the Fincom on March 29th.

Adjournment and next meeting: There being no further business to come before this meeting, a motion to adjourn the meeting at 8:50 p.m. was made by TP and seconded by BB and the vote in favor was unanimous. The next regularly scheduled meeting will be on March 8th at 7 p.m. at the Westport Town Hall.

Respectfully submitted,

Nicole Botelho, Recording Clerk