[0:00] Good evening. This is the meeting of the Finance Committee of Great Barrington at the Fire Station, 37 State Road, Great Barrington, mass. Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026 at 5:00.

[0:33] It is now 501, and pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the Open Meeting Law and Governor Healey's March 3rd, 2025 order extending remote participation by all members of any meeting of a public body. This meeting of the Finance Committee will be conducted via remote participation and people here in person.

[1:01] Specific information and the general guidelines for remote participation by members of the public and or parties with with a right and or requirement to attend this meeting can be found on the town's website for this meeting. Members of the public and committee members may attend the meeting remotely, following the instructions at the top of the agenda, and every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access proceedings in real time via technological means.

[1:24] Before you get going, it's not happening on screen. Or this. I don't see where you are. Well, I move around. You're right behind you. Yeah, I can't, I really to do that. Yeah. Because it's automatic. The camera. And he thought. That's such. And we see the participants that are up there, the people who are affiliated.

[2:00] I'd like to know. Okay, okay, I. We have the Berkshire edge, Eileen Mooney and Vivian Orlowski. Thank you so much. Okay. Perfect. Now we'll do a roll call. Rail. Yes. Jeff here, Michelle here, Doug here. And I'm Madonna and I am here. We are. Full team. Five, five. Full members of the committee.

[2:30] Okay, first, the second item on our agenda is the committee member announcements and or statements. Does any member have a statement or a something? Okay. Michelle, would you like to go ahead and I'll try to be three five. Patrick. And you know, grief is isn't my wheelhouse.

[2:59] First off, I attended a meeting last ten minutes on board and the library trustees. And throughout the meeting, we have no money. We have no money because Madonna and I can tell you from our budget season, it was dire straits us.

[3:29] So, I just want to keep that in mind because of proposition two and a half to brought up again let's Night, but also during those budget meetings I need it really clear what I would approve. And this is it. No more. And now we're possibly bringing in a new department, which we'll discuss it further. Agenda item. So I have some concerns about that in relation to that.

[3:55] For the finance, we're supposed to look at what our town is doing financially, and it's been brought to our attention that our charter, our charge is we need orderly and review expenditures.

[4:05] That no longer works. It's not going to work in these economic times. You want to look at your checkbook on a basis. So looking at this, the way to change the charter and I have it right here and I apologize, I was working my copy, but it's on the charter.

[4:24] Is that at a not at a special town meeting? I'm not going to be there. I'm going to be out of the area, but possibly at the May annual town meeting, bring forward that we want to change the charter where it states that our meetings are monthly and we review, receipts and expenditures monthly.

[4:45] So, that's just a couple points I wanted to bring out within on a future agenda. Plenty of time to do so. And I have, you know, in my opinion, since I've been on the finance committee for several years, we all snap lovely. We always review everything monthly, and all of a sudden now we're not.

[5:06] And I if you're in a financial crisis, you would think you would want to really good about it. So let's get it straight and straighten it out at an annual town meeting and be done with it. I have some comments. Actually. I think that falls directly from what Michelle said.

[5:24] That was a nice introduction to, and some things. So I want to say a couple of things that the two unrelated, well, related terms that they're about finances, but unrelated.

[5:42] But what I want to say is that first is that I recently read an article on the Berkshire Edge about Williamstown at their finance committee and how their finance committee, first of all, meets monthly. And moreover, they have been collecting and analyzing data, all sorts of data to try to give expert advice to, to the town as an independent body, giving expert advice. And I thought that was a really good model.

[6:01] And then the Williamstown, to the way the Berkshire Edge article framed it is that they can see that there, you know, that the crisis is coming. So there are two years out. I'm like us, which is it's right there on the doorstep. Yeah. So and then they're planning ahead and they're looking at their finest, looking at past patterns.

[6:17] And also they're collecting data from all the surrounding towns such that they could see what they're doing. Right, and what other towns are doing better and, and such. And I think that is a really good approach.

[6:34] But I think that is the only kind of approach one can do when the finance committee has the support to do such thing by the rest of the town, by, by the select board, by the town manager. So I think that's something that I would like to for us to think about. And, and maybe in conversation with the select board and the town manager and that what will do they want us to play.

[6:54] What is the most constructive role the finance committee at this juncture can play? And I think, you know, those are I think I think that's a good starting point because we have a lot of expertise on this committee, a lot of experience on this committee.

[7:09] And I think this expertise and experience can be used to the benefit of the the people of the town and also were elected members of the town, the people the town elected us to play precisely this role. They didn't elect us to sit around and talk and then elect us rubber stamp anything. They elected us to make independent judgment that then we can give as r as expert advice.

[7:26] So I would like to have further conversation with the other boards and to see how we as a, as a committee, can play this role. I think we can play a constructive role that we can play for the benefit of the town. So that's my first general point.

[7:43] The second is in terms of inspired by Crookes garage and what has happened with Crooks Garage, I think it is necessary for us for the finance committee, and this is maybe something we should make a formal request to have an inventory of all of the buildings the town owns and there.

[8:01] And so it's like the first of all the buildings of the town owns which buildings are being used by the town. Are there buildings that the town is not using? And if so, why do we own these buildings and not sell it off? Or, you know, to have a private developer that take advantage of it and also other information like is it insured?

[8:17] What kind of a state is it? An I think that we, I think crooks was made abundantly clear that this kind of information. I'm guessing is somewhere. But the finance it would be good for the finance committee to review this information for me.

[8:39] Jeff, as we move toward the next budget process and prepare for yet another special town meeting, we have an opportunity to reassert the purpose of the Finance committee. We want to make sure that we're effective, as we as effective as we can be in both the advisory and non advisory components of our committee's charge.

[8:56] I know that in the coming weeks, we will be meeting jointly with the Select Board, and I'm sure we'll have conversations with the Town manager as well as we confront the pressing issues that face this town. I hope we can be connected to the planning process as early as possible and provided with all relevant information needed to review, advise, act and communicate.

[9:16] Purposeful collaboration with other town leaders will allow us to best consider the issues at hand, and to forward recommendations and decisions that come from a deliberative process that has been validated by objective information. I look forward to the work ahead. Thank you John.

[9:32] Not as well prepared for the safety, but having the support. What are we saying with both of these? And interesting enough, that was my first reaction when I when I heard that this is a reflection of a town that is reactionary and not anticipated, this took place and we were not talking about it

[9:59] is simple and so characteristic of a lot of issues. One of the thoughts that that are still asking to raise the question of whether we have, I don't know how our insurance policies work, but as a town to have some kind of umbrella coverage that will rest this liability, this question,

[10:23] I don't have the meeting and that's not the case. And when I was a finance committee member, I just assumed they're being I'm sorry. You know, they have liability. They did Chris did a rat meeting. Correct. The town manager.

[10:50] He said, I just want to point out the liability just because of, you know, curiosity seekers may go in the building or whatever, that was a future certified, but also knew that building was I lived right down the street from that building and it was falling apart when we lived there number of years ago.

[11:11] So I'm just I'm a little surprised because I think it's a little I'm taking the town government edits for that. They think nobody we're going to share it. I don't know about that. I don't know about that. You, you know, but now, you know, you're going to take one way or the other and we're paying. So that's so for the future. We would have.

[11:33] No, you don't you don't have to know. But I, I, I did one and I think it in aligned with all of us. Sorry. And no no no no no it's fine because this is organic. This is what we're discussing. Privately. You have this building on the river and the severe disrepair. Having experience with the garage.

[11:59] What's the possibility that that could be problematic as well? We'll have to ponder that. Well, but I'm just saying sorry. We are in a community of a lot of structural. What's that? Which now? No, I know this that the old vacant facility that's right on the river and, well, this paper mill. Okay.

[12:27] And then you go further in and it becomes the Kelly mill is privately owned anyway. But I'm just, you know, where it can be a lot of that.

[12:42] So this is what I wanted to say, that the time has come to take a moment to clarify the role of the Finance Committee, particularly for the residents who attend our meetings in person, online and anyone who follows us. The finance committee is advisory. I think we've already been down that road. We do not established town policy, administer town departments or substitute our judgment for that of the Selectboard or town administration.

[13:13] Our responsibility is to provide independent financial review, asking questions, examining the information that's available to us, considering the effect of financial decisions on the town and the taxpayers. There will be times when our recommendations are accepted, and then there are times when they are not at any town meeting.

[13:35] Residents are entitled to understand not only what financial matters are being proposed, but also the financial implications and the reasoning behind the recommendations they receive. This committee will continue to work collaboratively with the Select Board, the town manager, the town accountant and any town officials, and we will continue to ask appropriate financial questions and make recommendations based on the information that is before us. Thank you.

[14:05] So I want to just as we're ready to head into the body, I want to say that we have a guest speaker,

[14:15] Patrick is here and he is going to be our guest speaker and talk about his passing and and Great Barrington, and we're delighted to have you here. So thank you. But we're just going to have a little housekeeping first and then the floor will be yours. Okay.

[14:38] I have on the agenda that there are approval of minutes for the 616 June 16th. Stacy Austro forgot that she had done them and she said, I think that's about to send you this. So that's why that's on there.

[15:02] And then the one for 629, the town manager that was the one of the, the, the town meeting and we met in the library and there was no recording secretary at the time, but we were going to get some draft minutes from the town manager, and we just it hasn't happened yet. So I'm sure it's, you know, it'll happen.

[15:29] And then the our last meeting, which was about five weeks ago on August 11th, did anybody have any comments on the June 16th? Did corrections? Know saying that I'll make a motion to approve June 16th minutes. Is there a second? Second. Okay. All those in favor I Jeff. Everybody five. Oh, okay. Sounds good. Five. Oh. Jeff.

[15:59] Okay. All righty. And now we don't have the 29th, so we'll go to August 11th. Does anybody have any discussion on and corrections amendments to the minutes? If not, have a motion to approve the minutes. Motion to approve August 11th minutes. Is there a second? Second. Okay. All those in favor? I and I'm an I five.

[16:31] Oh, okay. Another assigning a committee member to the CPC. A motion to table that once more. Should we keep tabling it? It's almost ready to come. Or should we? Okay. We'll pay. No, we got to address that. I wouldn't table it. Okay. Eleanor Jeffs, I, I just think I think a decision has to be made.

[17:03] Should we toss it back to the select board to try to find they can find somebody at large? No, it has to be one of us. Oh, that's what I can choose some jobs or to get services to.

[17:18] The finance committee. Can I make a motion eight, ten years ago that the last committee represented at the CDC, that was not everybody having vote. And that's my reasoning, was that we need, you know, I from a financial perspective.

[17:47] So it was past, you know, in our initial Sharon, I would absolutely agree with you, but there doesn't seem to be a single person on this committee that wants to be on it. That is the issue. And and you're you're flat out busy. You're flat out busy. You're working, getting busy. Doug wanted some time to look at other things, and I would prefer not to be on it.

[18:10] We delegate a representative of the finance. Or see if we could. If somebody would like to represent the finance committee. I, I would not support that. So we got we got it. I mean I'm going around the clock as it is. I mean, I had a three hour meeting last night, got the meeting tonight.

[18:33] And I always joke on that man. Okay. Speak both around the clock. But I'm also not charged my job. I in search of higher powers. You know what that's like. They tell you, stay like you, stay late, you know, and that sort of thing. So. And plus, I'm a public employee in another town.

[18:53] I can't intertwine, too. So, and during the course of a workday or I can't go online and or anything, so it's logistical for me. It's a difficult committee to be on. There's a lot of. And I do. Whenever I serve on a committee, I do my homework. And my husband would tell you that studying all the time.

[19:18] And but I, I will be sitting in on CBC. But it is a difficult board to be on for various reasons. It's a real crunch time on it. You mentioned I mean, there's well, also you got to that is something to consider. You're in the CC meetings are like there right after they're done.

[19:39] We go right into budget season, which I don't I can't speak for Madonna, but it was like I was on would I be by though. So so I, I, you know, perhaps we can give it one more time, you know, step back. Must have something to visual. So on it, I don't know.

[20:01] I guess the problem really is that the several of us are logistically incapable. Like I'm logistically incapable, you know, just with just being capable. And you said you're so. You know, some of us are simply logistically incapable of serving on the committee.

[20:20] So what do we do when we are logistics, when our members seem to be logistically incapable of serving on a permit? I don't know, but taxpayers have elected us. I mean, voters have elected us. The finance committee chair is always already pointed out. It's been structured that a representative of the Finance committee on it. I you know, it's like using a surrogate to serve on the CPA.

[20:43] I, I'm not going to speak with everybody else, but I'm going to support it. And we make a suggestion back to the or make a recommendation back to the select board that none of us want to be on it. It's not that we don't want to be. No, I know, I know, but and yeah, it's it's that.

[21:02] But I think considering the discussion I mean it's someone tonight wants to recommend to invite you check into the proper procedure to do that. And because I'm not so sure we can for that.

[21:27] But centering the discussion going on, maybe Jeff is right, you know, maybe do some little more stuff, but we gotta make a decision the next, next. Oh, oh.

[21:40] Eileen, do you want to you have something to say? Only that the member representing the Finance committee must be a member of the Finance committee.

[21:55] Okay, I guess we got that. Thank you. Sharon, I'd just like to say that, you know, I've read the CPA, a CPA, see, which rules which basically are the bylaws or the C administering CPA. And I'm very concerned about several things.

[22:30] You know, it says that town capital projects have buildings owned by the accounts you have by award. We say, projects that have a lot of public, in the book have, use have priority. And I've been reading this every year and we give it to baseball field, we give it to the mausoleum and so forth.

[22:55] So if it's possible for somebody to be even, you know, online, I will help in whatever way I know all the rules and so forth. But you all have to really be the voter of it. So, you know, I'll volunteer in whatever way I can, to refresh people's memory or to give you the interpretation of what we, you know, practice for the last 11 years.

[23:23] But I'll tell you, this town has $1 million to give each year in the past number of years. And sitting in the select board meeting last night and having the town manager say, we can't even find $10,000 to hire a historical commission, a consultant, to help us surmount the issues with the library.

[23:51] We are at our, you know, our credit, borrowing limit and so forth. So, you know, for us not to have a representative that just raises a hand. And remember the last time we had a big ask, which was the Ramsdale Library, it lost 7 to 1 that's really not using the CPA.

[24:15] And if we continue that way, I will say we need to withdraw or take up, take a pass for a couple of years on the CPA, a lion dollars thrown away is unthinkable. All right. Thank you. Need to move on. Okay, so why don't we gotta make a we gotta make a motion on something. Motion to table it. That motion is still in the table.

[24:36] My motion. And I'll second Jeff's. Okay. Any other discussion? Yes. As long as we don't. Well, I'll continue it one more time. But I don't want to continue it again. Okay. And as an individual member, everybody else does this. Anybody else? Doug real or. All right, we'll take a vote. Roll call. Vote real.

[25:03] Okay, Michelle, I dug and I'm an I. Okay. And we may wind up hearing from the town about that. You know, maybe they'll have an idea for a tie. That's right. Yeah, I thought, okey dokey. Here comes our big, our our committee governance discussion. Okay. But. Oh, I thought the big one.

[25:34] Well, no, no, but we're we're going to do our housekeeping, and then Patrick gets the floor. Well, we already talked about folks throughout. We did talk. Is there any other any other. Well, here's what I was going to ask.

[25:58] Is this something that once again, we should market this as one of our priorities that we want to discuss with the or bring forward any recommendations to the to the select board. Like we did a backup Cup meetings ago when we for the strategic priorities. Are you talking scratch. I'm talking every one of these. Oh okay.

[26:22] Down I mean we have listed Cooks garage the sewer which are on the going to be on the right, the South County connector prosperity way procurement audit boost tonic water. Berkshire Hills regional school district and something else that there was a disaster today this afternoon that we should be discussing. All right. Well, if I may. Yes. Prosperity. Procurement. Audit. All right. That the procurement audit trained has already gone down the tracks but it's like it went off the rails.

[26:48] I mean being very involved with the audit again you were on the finance and all of a sudden crickets. I'm going well wait a minute here. We're talking $1.2 million. I know it's going to litigation, but I'm not even getting an update. What's going on? This is $1.2 million.

[27:12] So if it's even if it's as simple, say it's in litigation, we can't comment on it just to keep it in the forefront that this is something that's looming in relation to the procurement audit. There's been there was discussion about an audit regarding the Prosperity Way project. And that's gone to crickets again, what happened today.

[27:35] And I'm on the finance committee and I don't know we talk about it talk about it during a meeting. And then all of a sudden it just goes away. And I, I personally myself, even if it, I mean, the town manager doesn't need to be here, but even if it's a blurb that's submitted to the chair, like, oh, this is an update on this.

[27:57] So we're not going to solve those two problems because we don't know what's going on. But for sure it's going to end up on our play. And I'd rather be proactive, as Doug said, rather than reactive and go, oh, you know, and I'm still doing homework.

[28:20] Well, I, I if I could, I think that our, if we can come up with a unified five zero to say this is we want this and we turn that over to the town manager or the select board. This is what's important. This is what we've heard. There's crickets. There's an example. We want an update. We vote on it. All right.

[28:41] We want we want an update from the town on that. This is important. We're discussing it and and we and I don't mind sending something to the town manager Steve Bannon about this is what we're we're talking about. We have an issue prosperity way. What what's going on. We want an update. You know a specific update.

[29:04] And we took a vote on it because it's important to us. I mean, I'm just thinking if we can be concrete and then we've done our due diligence. It's on our burner, it's still on our stove, and it's off somebody, you know, read warming of it. You know, we need to.

[29:31] All look at that is what I've been up here. The air. Sorry for my about. Looks like what I read in a publication. Is there no data source that we can pull it up as a committee and as a board to be able to access? I'm assuming that on the edge is accurate,

[29:55] but it would be nice to know the definitively information that's relevant to issues that we're talking about, whether it's prosperity. That's very way on our agenda today. All I learned was what I pulled up on the internet. Internet. Scary. Sometimes it's right, but sometimes it's wrong.

[30:16] And my concern is having factual data that we can use as a point of discussion and debate. And I don't know how to answer that. As I said, kind of this journey. Well, can we write up some sort? Can we praise some sort of emotion or about what what exactly we want? Am I being clear? Or maybe I'm just there, it seems like.

[30:37] So some of these items listed and all others are, I think it's more than informational, like there's actual, like financial decisions that need to be made. And then our committee should be involved, for example, with the procurement ordinances. That is more information update. You would like to be in the loop about what's happening because it's fine.

[30:58] But, but let's say something about, you know, the sewer that is of this financial system, but then that one there's, you know, I think there's a joint, it's it's it's going to be part of the warrant. So we're going to be meeting for the warrant.

[31:16] So actually our committee will be, it's one of the 19, I believe. There's two, you know, there's suggests I think this is just for two meetings with the board and finance committee, because a 19th meeting or something of the 19th of October. Yes. I think there's a there's two in October. All right. Yes. 19th.

[31:39] And then the meeting is on the 2012 meetings on the 19th. I have found that we have a joint meeting next Tuesday, the 29th, and I, I, I reached out to Liz, said the 29th, and I heard nothing like I went to Liz.

[32:01] I said, I may not be able to attend that meeting because it's coming up all Sunday. I have another method, but I do want to be in the loop.

[32:15] I never thought, as a finance committee member, I never saw a confirmation that it was going to be the because I told her if I get out of one thing, I'll get, I'll sign on if I have to or whatever, but I would appreciate it if any materials are sent out for the 29th, I get them. So I'm warrant. I think, you know, my my suggestion about this would be some of this might be to like the issues at hand.

[32:38] But for example something like the connector, it would be nice for us to schedule a meeting in conjunction with Liz, so we know that she can be there so that we can ask this question about the connector.

[32:54] Because also, I was a little shocked to learn about the connector from the media, like the report, the connector, rather than having received the report as a, as a committee member.

[32:59] So, okay, so here's here's how it needs to go. You tell me what you want. Let's find a couple meeting dates and we'll see whether or not Liz is available. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's hit or miss whether she will be. And that's the case. It's a busy time. Yeah. You got more than it is.

[33:20] And it's only going to get worse. So out of it I mean again last night she sat three hours. Yeah. And even if she isn't able to come. Personally I think in essentially all of our opening statements, we express some flavor of wanting information that will help us fulfill our charge in the committee and to have it,

[33:45] you know, before we're asked to add to to make a recommendation or an action on something. So it could, you know, we we listed out a number of items that individual members of this committee or multiple members wanted to address.

[34:08] It could be as simple as asking the town for a succinct update from a financial perspective on these topics that's suitable for sharing in a public setting. You know, at the very least, we're we're then receiving it in an open meeting or putting it in the record and then able to use it for our deliberations in the upcoming. They would and they would like us to be as specific as possible. Okay.

[34:28] So that they are there. Well, so they, they, they have time to prepare and give us what we want. But that's what I think. There's two different types of information. One is that things we would like for us to discuss. And there's others that you don't know what you mean or want until you have a conversation.

[34:45] So we actually do physically sometimes need Liz to be here for us to ask questions. So then we could, you know, something would become clear. So I think that's why, for example, the connector and the procurement order, two different things that we need to update. Right? So we just have to be specific about what we want.

[35:02] But like the the the connector we need Liz here. So we're going to ask for clusters. So I think as a committee we need to have a list of things we want list as list to be here so we can ask her about.

[35:17] And then otherwise specific information about issues that we want to prepare and advance so we can discuss amongst ourselves. And also and I do apologize, I wasn't in the loop as far as the meeting on the 29th. I don't know what happened there. And I'm kind of calendar driven both in Lennox in here.

[35:39] But regardless, because it's going to be a discussion about the warrant, the sewer capital projects going to be on that. And, let's see, garage is going to be on that. So it's Wednesday, you know, obviously if there's a meeting on the 29th, there should be a packet going out.

[36:01] So I mean, we have a there's a time for the town manager on that side of it for her to play to everyone five minutes before the 29th. But there should be a thorough packet that's sent to the finance committee and the slot board and that sort of thing. So we may want to put a pin inputs garage and the sewer capital project for right now.

[36:19] They get better captured breath and we do our due diligence on the night okay. Some county. I agree and we're talking creating a whole new department after going through a budget season when I said no new hiring, things like that. I can't one hand be hearing we don't have any money.

[36:38] And on the other hand, let's say I have a I also respond to that. You take the time go through not. Yeah. All 60 patients. And I think it really written very well composed and very well structured. But there was no financial infection. There was no assessment of the mayor. There was no assessment of growth.

[37:03] There was no assessment of me. There was no outline of okay, this is what we're going to spend 2026.728 and we're where we're we're on fumes as a town. And I'm not quite taking a pilot program, something really supportive and helpful for the community.

[37:31] But in assessing the credibility of that, we have to make an assessment and assessment. So the spreadsheet cost projection and and what the regular potential is, what the demand is. All that's identified in this is that they did 8000 runs in 2025. Okay. So that's 20 people a day that we can get to. That number is valid at a rate of $180,000.

[37:53] It's $22 a person. All right. Is that justifies taking a pilot program is something more robust. And it may be a conceptual idea, but in order to make a recommendation select board, I feel we need to have facts and data. And there was nothing in that report. And I don't want to be critical report.

[38:13] It was six pages, but there was no financial data, that there was no financial making that report. And we're a finance committee. Well, I will mention once again that the town manager's office has asked us to be specific and, give some dates.

[38:43] So if we're going to ask her to be here and get the information that we want. I don't want to be arbitrary. We need, we need I need to have dates and then I'll send her a point. I will send her a formal request to attend one of our meetings before we get going on dates.

[39:01] I just want to say that our son, coming from actor, was a Great Barrington independent involved in other towns. What's going on there? I mean, yes, we could look at the press and we hear the chatter. I mean, my needs been in the press two and I've read it. I got us not happen.

[39:19] But that's such a point. But there were other towns about we're not an island. Not in this project. Okay. And so I there's kind of, you know, I'm not voting on anything without knowing because what inevitably happens, you get this side start coming like that, you know this. Did you know that or whatever like that.

[39:44] And to I, I just know the person who created this. And I was very involved for years in it. And I have a feeling going insult and because we don't have a lot of information stuff that report is to throw the baby out.

[40:10] So I need more again, more information, particularly financial information, because you're going to remember whenever you create a new department, it's not just salaries, it's all the benefits. It's free time of their eligible. She was talking that the town manager was talking about uniforms, logos and everything like that and going, oh my God, I'm driving a car with 137,000 miles on it. I just always hear chain.

[40:33] Okay, so before there's any more trudging, I read what's. And there's also a component that, and where we got to talk. With all respect, Patrick. I mean, we got to talk, so I don't want to, but we're just. You know what? We're on a hamster wheel. Unless we have specific dates that we can agree on.

[40:57] And I can send a formal letter to to the town manager to see whether or not she would be available on any of those dates. That's what we've got. It's not going anywhere. We're just going to keep spinning our wheels. We are not going to get the information we want and to have her presence, public information.

[41:21] I understand anybody in this room get that information. Well, I'm telling you, we're not going to get the town manager in our room to answer questions without her benefit of knowing what we want to ask. And is she available so she can be prepared and and and rightfully so. She wants to be prepared.

[41:41] She doesn't want to, like, be on the fly. And we ask something that she. That's not fair. Yeah. And so that's, that's the structure that she would like. And that's what I'm saying. We're just going to keep spinning our wheels. We want information.

[42:01] And it'd be great if, if the town manager for here and we're not going to get her unless we do a formal request and give X amount of dates as far out as we can. And then maybe one of those will work in their schedule. Everything you're saying, and as long as it's every other committee does that to.

[42:19] All right. So so I guess now we're just still at a standstill. Here we go. We're going to dates okay. We're going to do dates. I got that one. Does it later on discussing dates. So that's agenda item ten. So why don't we move. Oh yeah. Okay. And then we can I just say something about Berkshire Hill.

[42:37] So the finance committee meetings. Yes. No. Okay, so, I got your. Yeah, I shared them with Madonna. There's a meeting tonight. Sorry. I'm sorry. My God, I wanted to bring copies. I was running well, I have one I can share, and I think the first date is tomorrow, and it's at 445. So I, I am going out.

[43:05] Kind of caught me off guard. It was after a week of meetings, after waiting to. I have planning board at those day night. I don't think there's one. So and then the one after that we're done. And when it's not one of the working group on October 8th, October 8th.

[43:24] So you can see that The Hills is already beginning their budget process. Okay. Well we're not. So but which of these meetings would be most impactful to have? They're all members of the committee have actually SAT is I mean you could say I just I don't know how many times I've looked at agenda and I've noticed I have some,

[43:46] oh, this is going to be a moving in and out of there and everything. Inevitably somebody said something and there you go, put them through. All of us have been through it. So, in my opinion, with the comments that keep coming up, Karen, you brought it up about for sure. Hills.

[44:05] I think all of them around the bend. However, can we attend all of them? That's the thing. Again, schedules are tight. I think we can do what we can do. You know, like, I was like the December and January ones are the most important.

[44:27] I mean, these first ones are working groups for, you know, sub sub areas of the school. I feel like just working for school sometimes. Those are the most critical meetings. You get into the minutia of it. And I have attended the set Berkshire Hills previously and it again, it's that one comment that comes up that sets up a red flag or whatever.

[44:50] So if I will do my best to try to get to the one to morrow night, as you know, on the eighth, I'm cutting it close. Weddings coming up. But I being in special ed, I would actually really love to go to that.

[45:10] What I will try to do if I can't be there in person to watch the recording. I mean, you know, thank goodness we have that resource and something that's really good too. So but I just wanted to bring people's attention to it. But John, I don't know if you can share share that as chair to the justice. That's. Yeah. Oh you're doing well I mean I made one. That's fine.

[45:34] One thing I'd like to mention about this is only on during the summer there was discussion here. One thing I'd like to mention is on there was discussion. This is during the summer that we would have an opportunity.

[45:52] Perhaps this is the specimen list that maybe we can meet with the school, that there will be some kind of more opportunity for the finance committee to actually meet with the school once early on, once in the have three separate meetings. Beyond this, I'm wondering what ever happened to that idea, because I thought that was a great idea, because this is not just something we said.

[46:06] Like Liz was there and thought it was a good idea to that, you know, the, the, the, you know, there will be more of an actual interaction, a conversation between the school committee and the finance. Well, one thing we have to keep in mind. So regional school district, there are other towns. No, but that was the idea.

[46:23] The other finance committee was also okay. That was the idea I think. Yeah, I do have to say in the in the good old days when I was on the finance committee several years ago, there was always a presentation to the town finance committee, which was I found it. Yeah. Wonderful to do that.

[46:45] We were. Yeah. Everybody in the same page. The finance committee put some questions going back to their time that went away. And I believe that the idea was to bring it back and have one in September 1st and December January and then one in March like it was proposed. So I would like to, I guess, follow up.

[47:03] Whatever happened to that suggestion? Yeah. Like what Doug found out, citizen state doesn't need to be honored at the regional level is some citizen speak is something that it could be brought up during a public comment at a school committee. That just a general comment. But I'd like to talk more about that.

[47:33] Is that because I'd say we're it depends on how open the the finance committee is to doing that. It's not that they're all or anything like that, but there's structures of different than what we have, like, oh, we let it all hang out. So, that's it.

[47:55] I just want to make sure we're respectful and like, you know, hopefully. So if, if I, I will do my best. Like, I kind of close tonight but I have to. This meeting starts at 445 I, I will try to get to it just as almost a soft entry to the.

[48:14] Finance system. That's I'll see what I but I, I I. You are correct that was discussed. Yeah that was but it wasn't assessment the other towns. No I think the idea was a list with and but we bounced back and she talked to the school committee and this idea and and see what came of it.

[48:35] And I'm not sure if it was followed up and then they didn't want to do it. You know, there would be no there's been a lot going on. And all of a sudden we're here, we're going into and he came up real plan. The CPA came up everything had special meeting in the middle.

[48:52] So, with respect to our town manager, she's so.

[48:57] If we're tired, she's fighting. Yeah. She's doing a great job, though. Staying on top of it. Okay. Are we now we're looking at calendar. Oh, no. No, we that's the last one. Oh. I'm sorry. Okay. And so we have our speaker, our guest speaker, Patrick White, and we are glad you are here. Thank you so much.

[49:24] I think that's impressive.

[49:31] Don't make us depressed, okay? I don't know, but how do I. Okay. I need to get to.

[49:40] Where a second. Refresh this file. But I need to share the moment. I try to share. A fresh, interesting. I wonder why it's not doing presentation mode on zoom. Can you select share? Yes. Once you have it on someone, share. And then I don't have to release it. Okay, okay, now you're sharing.

[50:15] You're actually the person I'm sharing.

[50:22] But the, I watched the full screen. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's go. So I, I, I live in Sock Bridge, part of your school district. Our school district, I vote for yours for this, for members, and vice versa. So we both share elections, but we have our own elections. I served on the Stockbridge Select Board, and.

[50:51] Professionally, I, I ran a couple of software companies in Boston, and I currently serve as a chief financial officer of a nonprofit. And, I took those sort of numbers driven approach to, to the select board. Let me go to the second slide.

[51:12] There's a bunch of trends that are outside of your control. We we as towns did decide to do proposition two and a half, which limits you to tune out of spending growth, you know, outside of certain certain other areas that, that are, that are exempt from that we own. You know, it's not other in the district.

[51:36] We were district was started around 1950. Was the school district. All right. And build things like affordable housing. There's a workforce here.

[51:49] And yet.

[51:57] Well, that. We know that, consequently, what we've seen is as, as our enrollment declines, bigger client has been more pronounced towns than it was in grade.

[52:26] You know, you've got more family here, my town, where, you know, new sales are.

[52:42] At the the connector on.

[52:48] To me, frankly, this parish pays for.

[53:01] Now. Suckers. The extra two is expected.

[53:12] It's a great place.

[53:19] My sense is

[53:26] for years we have we have

[53:32] sun River. Same. Is worth triple.

[53:45] Speed. Hold up the middle class.

[53:54] You know, in a formal housing

[54:03] and and and.

[1:05:15] I, I don't know if you can hear me, but we several of us who are listening have no value from you.

[1:05:40] You've lost your sound.

[1:05:57] All right. This is James. We can't hear a thing. As soon as Mr. White started speaking, you lost all sound. If you can hear me, you don't hear a thing.

[1:08:37] Follow me.

[1:08:47] Speaking to me. All right. Well, you fall if you think you have to mention them all. Absolutely. Give them a place. But if he. I don't have James's. We can hear you again. Oh, yeah. Okay, so there was nothing wrong about that.

[1:09:08] And, James, were you able to see the presentation slides? Is just the audio you were missing? Correct. We saw the slides, but there was no audio. That's correct. Sorry about that. The technology in the firehouse seems to have been failing us. Well, and you can hear me now? Yes, we hear you clearly. You didn't get to the meat of the presentation? No, I was just getting started.

[1:09:26] So I got all the preliminary slides. We're just going to keep going, but. Sorry. Can can we can you can you still hear us? Yes, we can hear you. Yes. Clearly. So reshare owl is working. Okay. Good. The owls working. All right, all right. Okay. Let me, Okay. So I'm going to remove from speak in the visuals.

[1:09:59] And then I'm going to go back to.

[1:10:05] Okay. All right. So now I'm going to go back to slide. Slide eight. Slide nine to slide nine. And oh sorry I need to pull it up again I, I turned it off.

[1:10:26] Pull this up again. Right. Let's see this. Is this not it. Right or wrong. Just just go a couple more right there. All right. And I would go full screen. So you just have to hit a button. Let's do full screen and that's fine. All right. So the point here is that. Doctor share.

[1:10:53] Yes I do share first and then the full screen.

[1:10:58] Share. Other side. That's fine with me. That one that one share. All right. All right.

[1:11:11] And then Where's the full screen. All right. So is a zoom work in again.

[1:11:24] Can we leave one person on to just confirm? Let's see. Because last time we shared, we lost. Okay, let's, let me see. Let's view here. Eileen. Eileen, can you hear us? I can hear and I can see. Oh, great. Thank you. All right, so this isn't just a report.

[1:11:51] I actually built this thing that, starts with the with the certified recap table, which basically starts with your actual real numbers. And then it gives you all the variables of all the decisions you can make, and you can actually play with the software just by going to the website. And we'll, we'll tell you like kind of if you're making progress of getting and getting or it's getting worse.

[1:12:07] So it's it's a projector tool. It goes out for years. So it's kind of cool. So we'll we'll see that at the end. Next slide. All right. So I'm going to start and end with the school because the school is the biggest thing. All right.

[1:12:25] Oh keep going. Just keep going down down down down about eight right there. One more stop there. No. It's finally work. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. Go back up one good. No. Yeah. So.

[1:12:42] In 2017, I was in town meeting. I was 181 of those years. It was after the second vote on the school failed, and we all knew we had to do something different. So we voted a different model for the new school than what the traditional model was. The traditional model is called foundation enrollment.

[1:13:04] And the reason I'm starting here, even though it's at the end of the report, is this is the most important issue in terms of how you're going to recover money. All right. So basically says I got 100 kids in town and you got your kids in town.

[1:13:17] So you're going to pay three times what I'm going to pay. That's what foundation enrollment is. That's how the operating budget on the school district works right now. F and a great guy, chip has argued for this for years. Yeah, but tell me I I'll do it. Yeah, I got it. Excuse me. Stands for equalized values.

[1:13:38] And what that basically says is you add up all the value of the real estate and you divide by that. So even though Stockbridge only has a third of the people living there that you guys have, we have like 70% of the value of all the real estate that you guys have.

[1:13:51] So at one end of the spectrum is your Indian service uses ETV. That's good for you, you know, not so good for Alford, but good for you. All right. So foundation. So with the capital costs of the new school, everybody says, oh my God, $150 million school.

[1:14:12] The capital portion of the school is like only a relatively small percentage of the overall cost of the school, most of its operating dollars every year. So so ecobee is very helpful in splitting up the bond payment.

[1:14:36] But foundation enrollment is a thing that's kind of that's hurting you because basically we've all seen decline enrollment, but you've declined less than what your partner towns have declined over the last 50 years. And so what has up happening is you keep paying a higher and higher percentage of the school costs.

[1:14:47] Now, we are like 100 students now from Stockbridge in the school district. All right. We might be down lower 70 or 80. I hope some young people who can afford the housing Stockbridge move in. You know, when I was a kid, there were 15 kids I could ride my bike to.

[1:15:01] And I don't think there's any kids in my neighborhood anymore. That's what it's like in Stockbridge. All right.

[1:15:08] Having said that, having said that, the reality is that isn't going to pay $200,000 a kid. Just send his kids to the brochure. Hills. My God, we should bus them to, like, you know, a dorm, you know, a dorm of Berkshire School where they can, like, live there, you know, for cheaper. All right.

[1:15:26] So this is a conversation that you guys successfully had with the town. What is a compromise look like in 2017 around the around the the capital budget for the school. And my suggestion is you start conversation now because this stuff takes time around. What's fair now? I think maybe what's fair is a foundation enrollment, and maybe what's fair is not fully cuvee.

[1:15:50] My sense is this right, that if you look at the percentage of students, maybe if you had a floor or West Stockbridge and Stockbridge that said, you know what, we can't control the rate at which you build affordable housing, where there's maybe single moms or kids and, you know, young people and people who work at the businesses.

[1:16:07] And all this is really important for this region, regardless of what the borders that came up with in 1780 are for these towns. But maybe what we say is in 1949 it was more like here and now with kids, it's more like here.

[1:16:26] And maybe there needs to be a floor that says, even if the rate of declining enrollment accelerates in some towns and decelerates here, that there's a floor that says we all pay a minimum amount, and that would be a compromise.

[1:16:48] So let's say, for example, if it's 75, 25 now, maybe it's 7228 or 7030, and then it doesn't really matter how many kids, if it gets out of whack, then you either pay based on the foundation if it's better or what the floor is if it's not.

[1:17:06] This is like a really simple concept, which is, you know, it's like it's like, you know, the credit cards, minimum payment, do you know? And and that's a conversation that I don't know if you'll have any takers for it. I know I think that for me, what's fair to me is not like I went to monument class of 1980, I went to Searles, I got my finger stuck in a desk.

[1:17:26] I was actually taking the ambulance, with my desk in Southern Berkshire Ambulance in like 1975 or something, because I was like that kind of dream, you know, growing up. All right. But I'll say this. These schools are really important to me.

[1:17:42] And if you came to me and said, it's going to cost you extra bucks in taxes to kind of pay a little bit more to make sure that as a district, because we're one district, I would support that. And I went to the nonprofit. I'm not like kind of, you know, it's running backs here. My point is just that may be just one structure. There may be other structures, but the school is the big thing here.

[1:17:59] Now, I mentioned before 1% of growth in your budget on the school budget, it's worth $2 million. Maybe the floor could be worth another $2 million. That closes half your budget gap by 2030. This is these are the conversations that you need to be having the school committee and with your finance committees and with select boards in other towns. All right.

[1:18:21] Now, sometimes it's hard enough, but you know how hard it is just to run your own town. And I get it. But there's a lot of shared services here. And the school committee, the school district is the number one by far, shared service of them all. All right. So thinking about what's fair here is a reasonable conversation to have.

[1:18:42] Because as your percentage has gone up every year, the school budget goes up four, five, 6%. And if on top of that your percentage is climbing even a point or two a year, then what ends up happening is that it becomes an untenable pressure on your system and your government, where it's 70, 80% of your costs

[1:19:02] and we end up with a windfall. And that doesn't seem fair to me. And I'm somebody who's going to have to pay more taxes for that. And that argument was successfully made in 2017 when we when you change the split of the bond for the new school from foundation enrollment to V,

[1:19:22] and I think there's a reasonable conversation to have here that somewhere in the middle. So I started with that because that's the biggest number. Oh, could you explain that last slide though. What's that. Can you explain that last side. Are you saying that, we paid 70.

[1:19:46] 6% in 2018 and if we don't do anything, we're going to be paying 83.5%. This might be run right now. Sure. You're the one. Oh. I'm sorry. Oh, I was on a different slide myself. Sorry. Hold on. Basically, this is like a. Yeah, this is basically a, you know, 2018. We're paying 70% of the school budget.

[1:20:08] My projection is by 2030 or up to 83.5, because of the significant decline in enrollment in soccer and West Stockbridge. And and that's based on that's based on my analysis of the K through six classes. I these are numbers that you can get from Peter Dylan better than me. But like this is where a flaw helps.

[1:20:28] If you can get back to 70, it makes a huge difference on your on your overall budget, maybe 75. I don't know what the right number is. It's not to me. I'm just here to tell you that maybe these are conversations worth having.

[1:20:44] And boy, and I just feel like somebody should be having them because you're you're going alone on some of this stuff.

[1:20:50] Sonic waterworks, you know, the school, these are things where, you know, these are conversations that all three town meetings would have to approve. But you've done it before. Do it again. You know where to go to the next slide. All right. There's other things you can do. All right. Now, the prop two and a half is exempted for new growth.

[1:21:12] New growth is like if you build a hotel that is 100 units instead of 45, the value of that hotel is more. That's the new growth that is that even the property tax on that doesn't count toward you two and net limit. All right. So new growth.

[1:21:29] You guys have proved Cecil communities so that statutorily that that Zetterberg that requires you to revisit zoning around you know the affordable not a not not a formal housing but on the, on the the seasonal community's designated housing, if it's going to be, you know, subsidized homeowner housing, you know, you, you you're going to have to have

[1:21:52] you're going to have more density as a result of seasonal communities. So a little bit more building and you got Simon's Rock, you got you got potential expansion of hotels. Those are all things that basically reduce the pressure on property taxes and generate more money to close the gap. So those are really good things.

[1:22:13] And me in the planning board, you know, as a town, you're working together with the planning board on our modeling things like what decisions might do to your recap.

[1:22:35] It makes a lot of sense because new growth is is is something that can deliver quarter million to $1 million a year to you go back to 2030 is going to take 2 or 3 years before you're seeing any of those results. But if it's an $8 million gap at 6.3%, you know, even a half a million, that's a lot. That's a lot of that get. All right, now you got Simon's rock. Simon's rock.

[1:22:51] You know, your son Bill there said they're going to challenge the bill. They're kind of pretty smart. They kept some of the nonprofit activities open. Hey, you know, that's one where I think that once it finally sells and figuring out how you develop, that it could have a much more significant impact on your budget than even this.

[1:23:09] But in the short term, the risk to you, of course, is that if they win, if they win, that basically it's, you know, then all of a sudden maybe some of the money that you're billing them, maybe not all of it, but some of it maybe should go into a, a reserve fund in case they prevail.

[1:23:24] I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, but that's what I would do if I were prudent. You want to be on Patrick? No. The next one. Next one. The menu at a glance. Yeah. Sorry. We'll cover. All right. We'll get to recover personal property tax and on filers. This is a tricky one.

[1:23:39] I have never seen a tax in my life. That is sort of. I volunteer to you what I what I make, you know, you got you got a W-2, you know, you get you're like, you get your forms that you fill out and send it IRS.

[1:23:55] You know, it gets filed when you know, you get your you know, your your 1099 or 1040,

[1:24:56] you know, press post video. That's where we are. Yeah, yeah. James, can anybody here. Can anybody here online.

[1:25:13] Testing me here. You're back. Okay. All right, all right. Okay. We're back. All right, so let me do share again. Yeah. Just for the record, I didn't even touch the computer. It's like there's a ghost in this place that's, like controlling our equipment. Yeah. Both on a video or up and running. Okay. All right, so we're back.

[1:25:37] Share. Okay. There you go. So my point is just simply this. And then we'll go to a slightly more of these, you know, look at the numbers in the millions. Numbers in the high.

[1:25:53] So those are the things if I had limited amount of time I'd focus on the big numbers first, because the big numbers are what is going to is going to generate the revenue you need to run the town and potentially, you know, mitigate the the pressure on middle class taxes. All right. That's it. We're going to go into each one. Go to the next slide. So what is new growth.

[1:26:09] New growth is basically things like zoning reform. It's things like Simon's Rock development. It's things like expanding the hotels from a minimum a maximum of 45 to 70 or 80. All right. Grow the base. Grow the base is good. Now one of the things to remember with is you grow it in three ways.

[1:26:29] Because not only do you get property taxes, you get.75 percent on meals tax and you get 6% on rooms tax. And that is the 0.75 and the six. Those are exempt from proposition two and a half. So it's free money that tourists are paying. I love the idea.

[1:26:50] I mean, I don't ever but you know, I kind of like the idea of like a tourist paying a little bit more, you know, and, and your property tax payer is a little bit less so, you know, I thought, I think it's been reading the paper. What you're doing around the 45 unit cap is fantastic. It is a great idea.

[1:27:06] You got, like I said, you guys are doing a ton of stuff, right? You know. All right. This one is a this one is basically this one is controversial. I've had people say go the next one. Yeah. There up some coming out here. You know what he's texting me. And what is personal property there.

[1:27:27] So if you're a second homeowner you got to basically pay the same tax rate on the contents of your home as the value of your home as full time residents. Don't do that. I don't know why that is. It is the law in Massachusetts. I don't make the laws.

[1:27:42] I think that it's very important for us to recognize that, that it's not up to us with the state laws are this is not an optional thing. It's a requirement. The part that's optional is this you declare that your value of your home is worth less than ten grand. You don't have to pay anything.

[1:27:59] So what happens? The same thing, similar thing happens in most of the towns around here. 617 of your second homeowners declare nothing. Contents of their room, their place at less than ten grand. Now look at. I bought a new living room. Saved up for about a new living room a year ago.

[1:28:19] It cost 8000 bucks from Pottery Barn, and my guess is it was worth a thousand bucks the day it got delivered. Because you know what? I think that a Pottery Barn house. The appreciation happens right away. No one's going to buy my used couch. You know, I smell like you'd have been on it. Yeah, whatever. My, my.

[1:28:34] The point I'm making is that it's not unreasonable that some of these homes are Pottery Barn homes, right? But to suggest that only 26 homes have maybe more than $10,000 worth of stuff. I'm sorry, 50, $100,000 worth of stuff in them.

[1:28:53] I've been a lot of people's homes where there's a piece of art that's worth 5 or 10 times that just on the wall. So what ends up happening here is things get underreported. Now, one of the reasons for that is that these are this is what the crazy part of Massachusetts law is. These are these these records.

[1:29:14] Anybody can do a public records request and get, in effect, a list of the stuff in your house. How crazy is that? So I am not suggesting that you're going out and knocking on people's doors and necessarily inventory things.

[1:29:33] But, you know, I do think that a simple letter sent to second homeowners explaining what the law is and suggesting to them that that they need to report a fair amount on their personal property tax, maybe that generates an extra, you know, getting that 617 up to 500. I don't know. I think this is one where it's it's a weird law that is unique to master. I couldn't find anywhere else in the whole country that has a law like this. I don't make the laws.

[1:29:51] There's a law that you're supposed to pay the same rate as the, you know, the commercial, industrial, personal property. That's basically, you know, if you do a split tax rate. But that bucket is is what, you know, is what gets charged.

[1:30:09] The second homeowners that primary residents don't pay, maybe just the right effort to, to try to recover that. Maybe that's worth 100 grand a year, but that's something that's they're kind of sharing studies over there. All right, now you're already looking at pilot. That's great. Maybe that's another 50 or 100 grand. The stormwater fee.

[1:30:29] This is basically saying, you know what? If you if you do a stormwater fee and lower the highway department as an offset to the highway department, which is in your regular budget, operating budget, then what you end up with is basically maybe up to 68 grand a year. You get a nonprofits because nonprofits pay fees. They just don't pay taxes.

[1:30:49] So that's a law in Massachusetts. You can put a stormwater fee in. Everybody would pay the fee, but you see a corresponding reduction in what the what the, you know, amount on the budget would be for the highway department parking. You've talked about parking. I have no idea what parking would impact your town on.

[1:31:07] You'd have to have folks, you know, doing the tickets. People don't like parking, but you know, something to look at. None of those I think are big. I'm not going to spend much time on the residential exemption. You just voted it down. I mean, at town meeting.

[1:31:22] Looking at it, I will say this about you're not a 12 to 15% like you thought, right? You're at 28% to 34%. And what was it stated in public meetings? Because I think that what happens is that these towns are changing. I personally have no idea what was. I know that was one thing I focused on because I work in Lenox. Okay.

[1:31:42] And so they have the big Lenox article here. But repeatedly during budget meetings, during public meetings, it was stated our percentage of second homeowners is 12%, after commercial is 16%. So why are we not being given accurate gas? Commercial is completely different than second.

[1:32:09] I know that but I, I, I wanted a comment with regard to a split tax rate as Lenox has a split tax rate and their taxpayers are much happier than our taxes. Well, so let's deal with the two separately, though the cherry sheet and not the share sheet. The recap table tells you what the commercial, industrial, and residential property classes are. Okay.

[1:32:34] Absent understanding within your residential class, absent you have an adopted RT and nobody has in Berkshire County. There's no way within the. There's no way to easily tell who is a primary resident versus second homeowner. What I did is I basically said this. Okay, here's the assumptions I put in to come up with that number.

[1:32:56] If you are a voter and you live in a house you own, you are by definition of full time resident. If you're not and the tax bill goes somewhere else, or you file the personal property tax, you are likely to be a second homeowner.

[1:33:14] If you're filing a personal property tax, you are by definition a second homeowner because residents don't pay that and then that include houses that were owned by a trust, you know. Yeah. Well, so there's two different types of LLC and the trust. One of them you can is basically a RT is basically treated like from a perspective as as a, as a second home and the other isn't.

[1:33:35] And it's really easy. You just switch from one to the other. But in this model that you did, this model is basically if if you're a this model is if you're a full time resident, if you're at that address, it considers you to be a full time resident. Yes. Let me get so basically we were told 1,215%.

[1:33:53] But that was probably a guess because I think that's probably what it was five years ago. Oh, okay. And then but when you had to look at the data and analyze this, you, you saw that the best estimates are were probably around at 28%. Yeah. And here's the thing. I saw this happy.

[1:34:06] I'm just sitting here because I spent a huge amount of hours sitting in meetings. And this is something I was opposed to the RT. I am still am. And we're making decisions based on information that town employees are giving us. And I'm sorry, Patrick, it's really hard to crunch. This data I don't care. That's hard.

[1:34:29] I mean, I, I do hard things every day, but I better get back your head formation. I'm sorry. And I I'm. I'm done. It's like we wasted our time during. But, I mean, there were. I'm sorry you plucked a nerve there, Patrick. Oh, I'm just telling you what. And I saw the.

[1:34:48] I saw the same thing in a lot of these towns where basically, like, you know, in soccer, for example, we were we were told it was like 40 to 50%. And, you know, I know I looked at the last five years of sales data and what's happened is that of the people coming into town, it's basically 32% are registering to vote.

[1:35:07] So they're mostly like wealthy retirees or can afford to buy in Stockbridge. And the other 60% are second home. So at that tells me, is that right now, if we're at 50, it's going to get to 32 in the long term, you know, curve in in as you as you approach in the long term

[1:35:24] if it's going to settle at 32% Stockbridge. So what's crucial. So I have that yeah. So I, I believe that the commercial is 13%. Is that right? I down but second homeowners went up. Split rate business property is only about 13% of in Great Barrington. This is what the equalized value is.

[1:35:46] This is what the value of that classes. It's not a bit of number of parcels or whatever. Okay. So as far as from what I can tell, looking at every single tax bill, it's 13%. And here's the problem with the split tax rate here. Right.

[1:36:04] Because the low well, you know, basically to get $1 in savings for a person you have to for that class. You have to raise it $7 for the business. So you know, it's one of those things where if, if, if all you had was like market 32 and you know, you know, a big giant box, big box stores would be one thing.

[1:36:23] But this is a pretty great downtown here. And, you know, it's a this is a it's a trade off. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. It's not my job to recommend policy here. I'm telling you what, the numbers down. I get that all right. Do you think they can hear? I went to Vivian.

[1:36:36] Has opened up here or not? I'm not getting a text from the game here. I guess we're good. Okay. Yeah. I don't know what you said. Yeah, he wants to just. I just want to make sure that people can hear and. Yeah. Oh, yes. James. So text me. You okay? And I think we should wait on the.

[1:36:52] You know, other than figuring out, I think we should just get through the rest of this, and then we'll talk. All right. Now, there's another thing to look at, which I think that periodically you should look at which is this the the computer aided mass assessment system assessors have computer aided mass assessor tools that look for comparables.

[1:37:13] So if you have a $400,000 house that looks around here for other $400,000 houses or houses that are like ranch style versus Victorian, and it's about the same amount of space and about the same amount of land. And it basically comes up with assessments that are fair based on the fact that there's a lot of sales.

[1:37:31] Right? When you're in a $3 million house, there are no comparables. So what study after study, the Federal Reserve in Chicago, the Federal Reserve in Saint Louis has shown is that because assessors have to go in and this is not at all about your sister, I think that she's awesome and he's on whatever.

[1:37:50] This department was really supportive of this project. It happens over and over again, according to the Federal Reserve Banks, is that when folks have to go in and one off these assessments, they tend to be conservative.

[1:38:10] So what you end up with is a situation where you're more likely at the low end of the market valuation, to have a fair assessment based on what it's worth today, then at the high end of the market.

[1:38:27] And so what ends up happening is like, if everybody is supposed to pay, you know, a dollar or, you know, a $10, 1000 or $20, 1000, well, if your house is worth it should be assessed at a million, 800,000 or 10,000,008 million. Whatever the number is, you end up with more of the burden shifting to the low end, the low end home. So there's a lot of comparables, you know, you see what I'm saying. So once in a while, the same allows you to do a a slide.

[1:38:47] You want to be on for this. No no I'm sorry. Other ways to shift the load. Sorry I should yeah. There you go. So yeah. So one of the things you can do is you can basically do agree aggressively test it's legal. You can do it. And once in a while you should do it.

[1:39:00] And that just makes sure that the different relative values on real estate that your own, that you're making sure that it's fair from the lowest value homes to the highest five. All right split break. We talked about that.

[1:39:19] You know basically split rate is is is you know, you can you can, you know, you can you could do a split rate. It's going to be more difficult to lose it. No. All right. And then finally senior exemptions. One of the things I would really focus on is some of these ideas, like, like the residential exemption, people were worried if they had a $1.

[1:39:37] 2 million house, they were on a fixed income and the tax are already high. They would go up even more. Right? And one of the things I would just encourage you to think about is most of the high value homes they're owned by residents are either folks who bought recently or folks who are what, you know,

[1:39:58] the chair in Alford calls legacy homeowners. People have been around forever that house.

[1:40:09] They end up with a farm and there's lots of land, and it's worth a lot of money, right? You're you've got a really good profile already with your senior. There's some movement, and it's in the report where you could kind of up them a little bit. And the most important thing for seniors to recognize is that they can delay some or all of their taxes if they want.

[1:40:28] Our generation of homeowners, Michelle and mine and and Madonna's have seen more appreciation in our homes around here than ever, than the sum of every prior homeowner since the Mohicans had all the land. All right. The model of money that my house went up in the last ten years is worth more than the amount of over the last 300 years. We did pretty well.

[1:40:49] All right. So if I were, if I don't even have any kids, but if I had kids and I was going to leave it to my kid, you know, it's one thing if you think the kid might live there, you don't want to defer your taxes then.

[1:41:04] But if it's unlike if it's likely that when you decide to move to Florida or to the, you know, you know, the Monument Mountain in the sky or whatever, that the house is going to get sold, there's absolutely no reason not to defer your taxes if you can't afford your bill. I had somebody call me who was an old teacher mine the other day.

[1:41:21] I may take you up on that one, but.

[1:41:25] This maximum is about where you're you're making a million bucks. You can't delay it. But but basically, it's not too good to be true. This is just an overlay. It's a senior deferral overlay. You guys have already adopted it. You already allow this on your books, you know.

[1:41:41] And so and so I think the thing to you know what what I saw with my dad was my dad lived till 79 and I actually inherited the house I grew up in and decided moved back to it about 13 years ago.

[1:41:57] And and I found my dad was sort of a little bit afraid of living 100 not there was a thought it'd be a good thing, but he, he, you know, he had his little pension from GE and he was got really conservative and spending his money as got up in the years.

[1:42:11] And I just, I just am a little bit I was a little bit you know, it's not like the kids enough are proud. You don't want to take money from his kids. And so you spend a little bit less and a little bit less to make the money go a little further, or because your tax bill is real high and you end up not going to a concert, Tanglewood,

[1:42:24] or you're not going to coffee in the morning, you're not seeing your friends at going to McDonald's or out to dinner or something. And I think it's really important if for me personally, these legacy homeowners, it's really important to make sure they understand what their options are on things like a deferral,

[1:42:39] because I think that, you know, you spend your all, this guy was a teacher. You're just like, he was like somebody I knew at monument back in the days, like older now. And he's just worried about not being well for his taxes this year.

[1:42:52] And I just think if all the people that were going to kind of focus on helping, it's those two ends of the spectrum, the elderly, legacy homeowners, but also like helping the people who want to be first time homebuyers, who have kids, who kind of keep our communities from not being like just wealthy retirees. We're going to really need policies that support those kind of folks.

[1:43:12] And and the senior exemptions really are one of the things that we can rely on so that if some people are worried that some of the tax policies might impact them negatively, make sure they understand what the options are that they have that offset some of those pops, because they're there with with the tax refunds.

[1:43:30] It just means this if your 10,000 year in taxes and you're over 65 or 70 years old, whatever the amount you adopted that you can defer for ten years. And I think it's 4 or 5% interest at the end of the ten years, it's buck 20 is owed and perhaps sells for 800,000. The proceeds the first 120.

[1:43:48] It's a lean first to pay that off the great is that. Yeah there's already a lot of appreciation now so I don't spend too much time on that. But I just think seniors should understand that they have some options. And making sure that those options are understood is really important, because this stuff is needlessly complicated.

[1:44:05] All right. Now, I did a little study. Another one. All right, I did a little study on the connector. Connector touches all of our towns. Boy, what a crappy thing this is. All right, and be a root.

[1:44:26] You know, when you look at kind of like the MBTA, you know, I got the friend of mine was the secretary of transportation under solution one of the Republicans. And I got to walk the Big Dig before it was open a mile. That cost $24 billion. Two miles. I read it was two moms. All right. Government center alone was like two, $3 billion. All right.

[1:44:44] We basically have kind of like, you know, you know, Li Li does a great job and and I'm, you know, I'll say that somebody who ran for that job and she talks about rural equity and fairness. And this is one of those things that is a slam dunk. You've got roots that go from 6 a.m. till nighttime.

[1:45:05] You've got trains that go to 1 a.m., not just the 10:50 a.m. and you've got Berkshire County, where Harvard said the number one driver of economic development is the Harvard School of Public Policy for about ten years ago, is good transportation. We got really crappy.

[1:45:24] You can't even get a bus on a Sunday or half the day, or you can't rely on it. If you're going to a job and it's canceled half the time or quarter the time or whatever. Of course, great variance is going to look at how to augment a system like that where the state is underfunded. It. All right. Now look at some of these things.

[1:45:37] All right. This is like the 1919 trips a day. And they're spending 65 bucks a trip and BRT a they're spending 13 bucks a trip, right. You know, so you're getting a situation where difference keep going. No that's right, that's right. Yeah. So so basically what the point I'm making is this. All right.

[1:45:57] You're cherry sheet already includes I guess around $50,000 you pay for BRT. And then they're making you kind of, you know, pay for your own bus service or your own, like, point to point service on top of it. It's crazy. You know, if you look at like, for example, Hamilton, you know, the next slide. All right.

[1:46:19] Great Hamilton, 7000 residents, surely 7000 residents grandparents and 7000 residents. Y'all pay about the same in your transit assessment. And yet look at that. You know they've got basically, you know like way more service and you've got to pay for the connector. And they're not paying anything extra. You're double paying.

[1:46:40] And the station fix that because it's not fair to you guys. It's not fair to us. Stockbridge pays a big assessment too for transit. You know, we both do. Lee does, Lennox does.

[1:46:56] This is not fair to these towns that that they've got to augment their service because people can't get to a doctor's appointment or they can't get to their job. You know, not everybody has a license. I only got one. I, I got an injury in my other I, you know, I'm basically not going to be driving. How am I going to get around without something like the connector. I get why you're doing it.

[1:47:09] But man, this is like one of those things. If I was talking, you know, I think that these are the kind of facts, you know, somebody like Lee has got all these state responsibilities around the state budget and everything else. And and I think that for Paul, I know Paul and I'm pretty well.

[1:47:26] And the job is right up to here. And so feeding them the simple talking points so that the folks from Hamilton, you know, there's 160 folks out there and you get a one minute to make your case.

[1:47:41] And this is the kind of slide maybe if you could feed them information would help them do their job, which I think if they're doing a great job on. But we're going to need to make specific cases around things like the connector to our policymakers, you know, and that's why that slide is there. All right. Go two more slides ahead. I've got a wastewater fact slide I think it's getting late.

[1:47:57] So I'm going to just keep going on that and just return to the school formula. All right 2017 I keep going. One more 2017 precedent. We we twitched on on the school to be for the capital cost. The capital cost is only though like it was around 10 to 12%. Not even that.

[1:48:18] I think it's going to end up getting tired. The numbers I don't want to get a quote the numbers, but it's somewhere well below 15%, I believe, of what the school budget is, even with the new high school. So 85% of it is still based on foundation.

[1:48:31] And Roman joins the spectrum at the kids or count the dollars in the real estate.

[1:48:42] Is there something in the middle, you know, Basically student headcount. Great Barrington, this is a FY 2026 assessments, last year, just the one you want, right? Actually. Oh, yeah. This is the one, FY 2026, you're looking at 22.4 million. 4 million. West Stockbridge 3.

[1:49:09] 6 million for the wealth floor, which is the thing I've been talking about, which would be say, you know, you you come up with a percentage and the specifics of that proposal is in your report, then you'd be at 20 million, Stockbridge would be at 6.3 million. Why? Stockbridge would be at three. At 3.6 million. Full property wealth would move you from 22.4 down to 15.8.

[1:49:28] Stockbridge basically would more than double, which I don't think that those voters will ever pass because everyone's got to approve this. West Stockbridge, would go up a little bit, you know, about about 25%. Here's the thing. There's three ways to do this. And two of them I think are bad. All right.

[1:49:44] You can come up with an argument for what is fair and start a conversation. Or you could try to make a rate at the state level for an equal protection, like, you know, basically, you know, make it so that, you know, on constitutional grounds, you attack whether or not foundation enrollment is fair. I don't know if that would have any chance.

[1:50:04] It would go all the way to the state Supreme Court and possibly the because you'd have at least 50 times. That would be losers. Those towns might even appeal to the US Supreme Court. You're looking at something that could take 5 or 10 years to resolve.

[1:50:20] The third thing you could do is you can, you can, try to pass it at the legislative level. Now, personally, I think that, towns against each other and asking your state rep to do that, your state senator to do that puts them in an untenable position. And I think that the reality is that the nice way to do this is to come up with a compromise.

[1:50:38] I think that the current system is unfair. I'll say that as somebody who was for one year the chair of the soccer select board and for five years on it, all right. I think that it is also unfair based on the reality of how many students we have.

[1:50:51] And I think there's something in the middle that could be beneficial to all of us. And as a conversation between the stakeholders, it's not for me to decide. I'm just saying that you start having that conversation now because this blows up really quick, this budget of yours. And this is the number one thing that you could do for the next one.

[1:51:09] I'm not going to keep going in. Yeah.

[1:51:20] The you know, the reality is that, School is so much of a everybody talks about, you know, the things that things cost, right? You can't make up your budget by cutting things like $8 million to make up. That is 80% of the rest of your government after I think it's around 10 million bucks. Right. Or so that comes out of your taxes.

[1:51:38] You can't make up an $8 million deficit by cutting the police. You would have like, you know, one officer O.B. here. All right. You can't make it up by cutting the highway department. There would be nobody to plow your roads. You can't make it up by cutting the sewer department.

[1:51:51] The only thing you can do is all these things at once. And control costs and control the overall aggregate amount of spending, growth and control where the revenue comes in from with new growth, with creative uses of alternative tools like hotel room tax and like the, the, you know, the other things that are in the report

[1:52:13] and with kind of talking to your neighbors about what's fair on some of these things, I will say this.

[1:52:22] All right, we all rely on you. I live in a town that has a, you know, that has a main street that is half a block long, right? I mean, does have Tanglewood. So we got one of the big fish here. But, you know, the reality is. Yeah, sure.

[1:52:37] You know, 15 concerts a year, 20, 20, whatever it is, you know, two months of concepts a year. Yeah. We we pull our share. You guys pull your share all year long. I want to go grocery shopping.

[1:52:52] I come here, I want to go to Tractor Supply I come here, I want to go anywhere to, like, go out the movies, I come here, you pull your weight every single day. For all the rest of us. We get that. You don't need to remind us of that. All right? The town surrounding you.

[1:53:03] Things like shared services around your ambulance, around your school district, around your building inspector, around, every single thing that you can share is a dollar that that reduces yourself going alone. And dollar does. Somebody else pays. And some things like you're maybe 60% of the cost. I was a cafe there for a year.

[1:53:25] 60% of that cost is being paid by your surrounding towns. They don't have 60% of the calls. You know that near like nearly that many. All right.

[1:53:38] The fact of my matter is that, It's really hard to have conversations with surrounding towns when there's so much on your own plate already. But, boy, the payoff is really good.

[1:53:56] It's one of the simplest things you can do is to recognize that whether it's the connector or these all these other programs that just, you know, recognize that kind of every, every town has departments like it has finance committees and select boards.

[1:54:16] And everybody wants to read in the paper what they plan on, where you plan on doing, even though, as the majority player in all of these things, you know, like it is kind of primarily a decision, but, you know, it's kind of like the president in the Senate, you know, advise and consent. You know, it doesn't hurt to ask an opinion and to build consensus a little bit, because the last thing you want is to have all these costs, Paul, in you and not in the surrounding towns. You know, it's all I'm saying. Play nice with your neighbors.

[1:54:29] And I think you mostly are. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to interrupt. At one point we give these connection again, and it's that it's fine. You're you're good. But just for the record, it didn't follow. Which slide do you want to be on, Patrick. What, what. Let's see here.

[1:54:49] Go up to two here or the other way. Can you tell me, Ron? No, that's all right. Let me just look here now.

[1:55:09] Yeah. You know what? We're just about out of time. I will say this, though, and then I'm going to just kind of move on and ask. Oh, I want to show you the calculator real quick. I'll take two minutes.

[1:55:26] The law said the regional agreement said that you had to lock in the bond of the new school the day that it was approved. So you locked it in November 25th, right? I don't know what's going to happen with Simon's Rock, but I know this. I approve the development project, and I think that Lennox is going to approve. I don't know for sure.

[1:55:43] Michelle, you can tell me if you think I'm wrong. I think Lennox is going to approve their portion of dump court. That's two big, giant developments in Stockbridge that, that means that our equalized values are going to potentially shoot up over the next 3 to 5 years on a bond

[1:55:57] that over 30 years is locked into the November 2025 level. Now, that's the law. Yeah, that's what our regional agreement says. But as you look at things like a floor did kind of make the argument that like, you know, it was the most opportune time for Stocker to lock in at the bottom the percentage,

[1:56:14] because you looked at what the equity split was, the value of real estate split was when the vote was taken, which was November 25th, and that was before any of the revenue come in from these big seasonal developments that were doing down there.

[1:56:34] So this kind of arguments to be made that a little bit of a renegotiation of the contract because not only fair, but but the only realistic way the school district is going to get funded, you know, I'm going to just do one last thing. So going to go to the browser and I just want to show you this, like play with it yourself tool the browser.

[1:56:50] So I think I'm going to stop share. Yes that's right. And then you want to go to that Great Britain model. All right. And then let me I want okay. Let's listen to this. So you want to go to a browser now. Yeah. This is a browser. The browser. Yeah. No.

[1:57:14] Yeah. And, and go to, just go to parks. Com and you can, and you can just click on the Great Barrington button. Now click on open the dashboard for Great Barrington.

[1:57:32] All right. Way at the bottom. Two buttons. Oh, okay. All right.

[1:57:42] So I'm going to just go up and kind of point to some things. There's nothing to go through them all. I'm going to go share the screen again. All right. Let me share. And then and top left one for sure okay. All right everybody see that. Yeah okay. All right.

[1:58:05] So this does a couple of things I want to to click again. This one this basically takes your baseline. You know resolved I got again by the now I start to get a little tired. So just bear with me here. But, you have basically a certified recap table.

[1:58:27] And this starts with your fiscal 2726, I think it is certified recap table. And all the numbers built on top of it are based on your actual numbers. All that is hard coded into this.

[1:58:46] So all that work we did to suck all those records in and guess them, starts with basically, the certified baseline, and then it can build baselines all the way out to fiscal year 32. All right. Now what this does is it calculates two things. Can you just scroll just a little bit up. This basically says what's your budget deficit going to be. And how much is the property tax going to be at the median now.

[1:59:06] So you can put it in a different number here.

[1:59:14] Perhaps it's worth 750 put in 750 here 72,000 I will I wish it was 75. I'll tell you what. Your tax without any changes, that'll tell you what your taxes are. This is an interactive tool that will predict for anybody. They know what their assessment is. Anybody can go into this and figure that out. All right.

[1:59:30] Now up here we've got some basic basic tools that we can look at. For example.

[1:59:36] It allows us to basically go over and top again up the other way up. So we can basically have just some kind of buttons. We can basically say, you know, if we start, if we could be at a lower rate of spending growth, it'll show what it'll do to your budget gap in your taxes.

[1:59:53] I've created some preset buttons, like, you know, like in your car, how you can adjust the seat for two different people. I did create some preset buttons, so it would be simple for people to understand. But so for example, if you say 4.7 versus 6.0, you know, you can kind of see what it does to your budget.

[2:00:11] All right. Now over here, you move that screen, by the way, for all of you real keeps out there. You can go all the way up. No no no. Scroll up.

[2:00:26] Scroll like that. No, the other way. That's it. Sorry, I moved the button. Yeah. So click on assumptions. There you go. There's a 190 variables you can put in that will actually recalculate in real time with the impact of the budget would be. All right. So go back to For example every one of them has help.

[2:00:53] They explain what it is. So presidential tax rate boom total taxable value boom. So if you think that property is going to appreciate you could bump that up residential share value. So that that goes to the split tax thing. Right now it's 87% 83.7% for the upper go down. Scroll down just a little bit.

[2:01:14] We'll look at some of them you know. So basically all of the things that are in here, they're in debt exclusions, all these things that you read about and use levy capacity, how much you have left to spend, all you you don't understand things. Just using this right here.

[2:01:28] These little question marks will give you a primer on everything related to municipal budgeting. Every single thing is in here I could think of, and believe me, this is version 1.0. I worked really hard on this.

[2:01:47] It may not be like perfect, and there's a lot of people in around these towns that, you know, I mean, the professionals, people like Liz and Lego Canals and so many others know this up way better than me. This is like a layperson was on a select board. You know, it's really good at math and used to run a software company coming up with something.

[2:02:02] But I am not a Liz, okay? I'm not a micro canal, so I do my best here. But the great news is, is even if you don't use it to calculate an actual budget.

[2:02:18] It's a great way to understand the components to go into your budget and how they impact other levers and other kind of impacts on on that budget. Are you even close up? You know, or click on the assumptions again, just scroll down to the answer. You can see some of the other ones that are there. And then we're just going to talk. Just slowly scroll down. All right. Yeah.

[2:02:35] So basically like you predict the number of kids from stock versus Craig Ferguson, you think that you got more kids or you got fewer kids. You can get these numbers from here. How many people are in K through three. That's going to K through five. That's going to turn into 2032. What your what your growth rate is. You can those are they already know those numbers.

[2:02:49] You know they they don't kick you 12 already. You can get the three towns from here. So basically all these decisions for all of the more you know basically all of these decisions can be used to model with impact on your taxes. This is not actually on.

[2:03:10] What's cool about this is that it started from your actual data, all of your tax records, all of your voter records, all of your cherry sheet, all of your recaps, all the things that were out there. Your census data, all the things that are out there. It starts and all that's hard coded into the baseline.

[2:03:25] And then it works from there to kind of do the predictions, the projections going forward. So this is a really fun tool. And you know, I'm going to get out of my number. Right. Or has it Donna has it. I'm not going to I'm not going to necessarily just say it now.

[2:03:42] But if you're playing around with this and you don't understand something, just call me. You know, I'm like, yeah, Senator retired, I work. 20 hours a week, so I'm time to do fun things like this. I think this is fun. Some people think this is not fun. This is what I do for fun. God, I'm not here.

[2:03:58] So I would just. I would just suggest to you that that the stuff is complicated. If you want somebody to help you, not be happy to help within reason. You know, if you have questions on this stuff, I get it. You know, one last thing. I'll say blackboards, primary job.

[2:04:19] It's on the first page of the manufacturer, give you a manual when you get elected and get it from like May just to raise an appropriate right. And the Finance Committee has statutory responsibility and authority to advise the Select Board. It's not something that is a throwaway. Right.

[2:04:44] And a lot of towns, A lot of times you won't be voting the same day that you're getting the numbers. All right. And I think that, you know, this is going to be an all hands on deck thing. You know, if you don't write for ship, you're going to be in receivership by around 2032.

[2:05:01] What that means is this thing, you're going to run out of money in the sales sense. I'm going to run this place. It doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way. This is Great Britain, my God, for God's sakes. All right.

[2:05:14] This is these are solvable problems where if you kind of put all your heads together, there are so many great people with a variety of skills, including skills that are good, like the skills I'm talking about, like all of you, you know, and I just think, and many of you are loans to and I just think, consensus and team building. Nobody.

[2:05:32] I was a selectman and I took advice and sometimes I didn't like it, but I always made my decision. That is their job, to raise an appropriate cost, zero to listen to people, to build consensus.

[2:05:54] And I think that maybe right now that it just seems like there's so much going on that, you know, it's easy to feel like it's under siege. And I think that, you know, you're going to need to kind of break it out, break it down, and prioritize the things that that your committee is going to have to focus on.

[2:06:08] And, and I would go for like the lowest hanging, biggest fruit first, if you got a chance to pick a watermelon, do not be picking grapes. You know, there's only so many hours in a day. And these are volunteer jobs. I think your town hall is actually pretty amazing.

[2:06:23] I work with Liz Phair, you know, several meetings anyway, and and was involved in our side on the on the ambulance discussions. She's smart. She's capable. You know, it's like it's tough reading your name in the paper and sometimes kind of not necessarily liking the way it's spawned or not be able to say something because it's under, you know, it's it's legal and, you know, there's certain things you can't talk about.

[2:06:41] Being a town manager is a hard job. I say this to the voters out there, cut her a little bit of a break, you know? But at the same time, you know, you guys are elected and you have responsibilities. And I would work as a town toward a culture where it's all hands on deck.

[2:06:55] You know, that's first, let me say, what you put together is extraordinarily impressive. And having spent the time to read through what you published and the better part of 50 pages, it's slightly overwhelming. Yeah.

[2:07:19] To your point about focusing on the primary topics, certainly the school, which indicates over 70% of our is the biggest potato in the room. One of the motivations that you identified in bringing Stockbridge into line with what they should be paying was identifying what they were having, as we defined it, as a windfall and, income relative to some of the construction that was going on. Yeah.

[2:07:46] If I was experiencing windfall, I don't know that I would necessarily be raising my hand and saying, oh, they were following me. Let me contribute. It's not an issue. I'm wondering whether you have any other thoughts as to how to address that constructively. You've given a lot of thought to this in initiating bringing Stockbridge.

[2:08:07] And as you said, the adjustments in West Stockbridge are nominal. So Stockbridge is is is the biggest challenge here. What would you say would be a rational? I think that the rationale for Stockbridge is exactly the rationale for the residential exemption. I know a lot of you don't like it. I'm just going to give you you've asked my opinion.

[2:08:22] I tried to stay away from opinions about you after spending 100 hours on this and I get paid, I'm gonna give you five minutes of two minutes of opinion, I won. The argument is this Stockbridge is going to 68%. Based on what? What percentage of people buy are registered to vote.

[2:08:42] We're going to be at 32% residents and 68% second homeowners. I'm a second homeowner. Come to Stockbridge. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Made some money. They bought a house. They love Tanglewood I love it. It keeps my taxes down low.

[2:08:56] But I'll tell you this, the last thing I want is to not be able to find someone to fix my roof or like, deal with the problems that you know what, I. I only use half my house. This is a true story. So I went up to I was wearing, like, you know, a t shirt, and I looked like a slob today.

[2:09:08] I was like, I don't go in front of the screen. So I go upstairs through my bedroom. I always sleep downstairs on a single bed. I go upstairs, ended up there three days, and one of the screens had come out and there were 300 wasps, at least in my bedroom behind the closed door.

[2:09:24] Okay, I'm a second homeowner. I want to make sure there's a middle class to, like, deal with that crap or to fix my, like, my septic that breaks, or to make sure that I'm that, that, you know, that somebody is working, like, as a waiter or waitress or,

[2:09:41] you know, a shopkeeper or shop, you know, clerk or whatever. You guys have the labor that the rest of the county needs. And I cannot imagine that not protecting your middle class, it's got to be the most important thing for all of South County has none of the rest of us

[2:09:56] are going to have it in 5 or 10 years. All right, it's the ship to sail. I had this argument with a woman I ran against, and they were right. I kept arguing that we could move the needle in and the ship had already sail. It hasn't sailed here. Protect your middle class.

[2:10:11] And the way you do that is you make sure people understand that if the middle class can't afford to live here, then when the houses sell, it's going to be sold to wealthy, wealthy folks who can afford to retire here.

[2:10:28] And and I just think you got something really special that, you know, when I was a kid, there were 350 kids from Stockbridge in the school district. There's going to be down to 70 in 3 or 4 years. Think about that. And my lawyer, what, 40 years old? You know, think about that. In one lifetime, it was 80% of the kids in your town. You guys haven't done that yet.

[2:10:47] Don't. Because, man, it's it's it's kind of sad. I'll tell you the best thing. The only thing that was good about the pandemic and Stockbridge was all the second homeowners sheltered in Stockbridge, and they all had their kids and their grandkids sheltering with them.

[2:11:07] And it was the first time in 40 years it felt like the Stockbridge 20 years. It felt like the Stockbridge I grew up in, where you saw all these kids around, those people with strollers, the things you take for granted. A lot of these towns that my average age is around 65. The average age in Massachusetts is 39. Think about it.

[2:11:23] I'm 63 and I'm the young half of the people in my town. That is crazy. And it's something you guys can avoid. But if you think about where your policies need to be to protect that class and protect like.

[2:11:38] Incoming quality is a real thing and it happens because we we we are good at that. We're good at like, you know, positive that doesn't produce the doesn't support the tax rate. And we're good at selling multi-million dollar homes, but we're getting really bad for people in the middle. And you know it happens.

[2:11:57] Stockbridge I'm just saying don't let it happen here. And I think that's the argument for Stockbridge. I think that's the argument for why you make sure that as if you're really looking at a for a $750,000 house, a 15 or $20,000 burden, at some point these towns are going to have to look at shifting

[2:12:12] the burden to folks who have an ability to pay. Is it fair that they don't have kids in the school system for them to pay more? Maybe not. I don't have any kids. I don't want to pay more. I mean, I want to pay my school budget. Government is not a la carte.

[2:12:24] You know, if you don't have a yeah, you need the roads plowed. It doesn't matter if you have a car or not. You know, I'm just saying, I think that the ability to pay is going to have to work into this, or else people want to be able to afford to pay the.

[2:12:39] Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. All right. We're going to close up this meeting. We just went, oh no, no, I know what incredibly impactful presentation. What's a very impactful yeah I don't I'm not rushing out. So just hang hang hang hang tight here. We lost. All right. So this is still there. Still there.

[2:13:08] But you save some time for citizens. Yeah. Yeah, that's it's on. It's it's it's definitely on here. Oh. So I call on the, so I Vivian has our hand raised. Okay. So we, we now is the time for citizen speak. Okay. I mean, to hurt, and Vivian's been putting our hand up for a long time.

[2:13:31] I hope she's hope you haven't fallen asleep. Vivian. Hi. I'm going to be really careful about keeping everybody at three minutes, okay? Okay. Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, we can go. Go for it. Vivian. Yeah? I had problems hearing part of that Patrick's presentation, so. I'm sorry.

[2:13:58] I had questions for for him, which I don't think should be taken as part of my three minutes because he said he would answer questions as part of his presentation. Do you agree with that? Well, it's just that we we're already at ten after seven. So I just want to be very mindful of of how long the meeting is being run. So and and Vivian. Yeah.

[2:14:19] We can't do them all now. My number is 4415231. Just call me. And I would be happy to spend as much time on the phone with you as you want. Well, I think the I think the broader audience in the media should hear my questions.

[2:14:37] My first question is, did you sense, since there were technical difficulties and I didn't see everything you presented in your very impressive research and, and, and financial presentation? I didn't hear anything about the choice in and tuition in students that take up a such a big section of our the operational budget in our that question for district.

[2:15:01] Look, I think, I think that a choice is set by the state. I would not focus on things that, you know, would exception of the connector. I would use that as an example of how I don't think it's fair that they're trying to push a rock up the hill to get the state to change.

[2:15:16] Choice, which has been the same since 1993, is a waste of your time. I think that's for Li and for Paul Mark to focus on. That's not anything this town is going to have any impact on tuition. Tuition in is is a separate is a separate issue.

[2:15:33] I think that that, that the school administration believes that that it it helps create a diverse and well-rounded critical mass of students. I think, though, that the other side would think that, you know, with some towns paying less than half pursuant to tuition in then then Stockbridge in West stock version Group, Burton says pays it may not be fair.

[2:15:55] That's some one that's a really it's important, but it's also kind of one of those things where I don't think I think the choice in is maybe could move the needle 3 or $400,000. And by the way, I'm just off the top of my head. I don't know that that's the number.

[2:16:10] You know, if it were to go up, be it, but more importantly, that it's not this committee's purview. It's the decision around the school committee, which is elected. And they are the ones who decide the tuition and rates. And I think they just signed contracts through 2029. So it's a little bit premature to deal with it.

[2:16:28] Yeah, I mean, I know I know the answer, but I'm just saying that this is this was more of an observation and a question. If I missed something that you already observed.

[2:16:51] The second observation is, and I'm not asking for your response about this because we've discussed this previously, a town meeting and many other finance committee meetings since 2015, which is that the, real estate, taxes in towns that are using residential exemptions, which don't only apply to benefit residents, but those who have real estate values below a certain amount, which is not necessarily include all residents.

[2:17:22] But the towns on the Cape, in islands that are also seasonal communities, as we've now selected, they have mostly, tax percentages in the 7% or lower level per per thousand dollars of assessed value, and we have above 13% because your property is worth less than the Cape.

[2:17:58] Well, that's actually doesn't matter if if there's two variables that work, you know, as, as opposites, if your house is worth 2 million, then your tax rate 6%, then you're paying a lot more taxes than if it's worth 500,000 to 12%. You know what I mean? It's kind of like the two offset each other and Cape values for your. And if this is taking off my time. I know, I know, and I just feel like that's not fair.

[2:18:19] Well, we're trying to be fair, but we also have. I'm just so for the second point, I asked if I could just make the comment, and yet Patrick felt that he had a response. I just wanted to give me another Vivian, how about another minute and a half? Thank you.

[2:18:36] I want you to make that point, and that the other towns in the Boston metropolitan greater metropolitan area that use the the real estate exemption are those that Patrick referred to in some cases, those who have the major commercial sectors with the big box stores and everything like that, that can get big taxes, estate taxes from.

[2:19:00] And then others said that, I don't know if you mentioned because I couldn't hear everything with those with large apartment complexes and, you know, major corporate ownership of those apartment complexes. So that's the model we have so far in our state.

[2:19:21] What I would like to suggest under maybe I should wait until number nine comes up and you will vote on future topics. Is it topics should look at, proven the precedence of policies with positive impact on town budgets and town taxes that we can learn about from other states. We are not in a vacuum, rate of stress at the beginning, the importance of data from other towns. I agree with that.

[2:19:50] And I also think that we can learn in selective places from data from other states on specific programs. And I have a few specific examples in mind, which I won't take time on. Now, if there's some time and when you discuss item nine on the agenda, or maybe I don't know when.

[2:20:11] Certainly you wrote to me in an email just today. Yes, yes. Yeah. But I wanted it to go public that this is a whole framework that does impact everything we do and where we can have influence at the state level, because that's the that's the ocean in which we're trying to swim. It's the state level.

[2:20:32] We're also trying to deal with federal taxes. I don't have suggestions on that because that is a lot more difficult. So I would appreciate the opportunity next month to suggest specific examples for your consideration to either approve, a discussion about and I'm glad to bring research and data for on the basis of it, not just discussion.

[2:20:57] Thank you. And you're very welcome. Thank you very much. Okay. Sharon, do you have, three minutes, three hesitation by 2030? I don't know, we want to see 70 or 75% of taxes going to the school a little 83 or 86% or whatever you're going to project, but for sure it's going up. So I take Patrick's suggestion seriously.

[2:21:30] We should renegotiate the, you know, three town agreement. And how do we do that? First, I would like to recommend that the finance committee make a recommendation to the Select board to give it a little more, more up to, to show your concern that we should do that sooner rather than later.

[2:21:52] As I said at the board meeting yesterday, it took one year to renegotiate it. And how did we do that? Last year, Chip Blitzer led a.

[2:22:06] A motion that we reject the school budget. And we did. And he said, you know, we just want to show we have the votes that because Stockbridge said, do you guys pass it all the time? You like the school budget? Then Jim said, let me show you. We don't. And we voted against it.

[2:22:27] And we said, we voted back in within 90 days. So we don't have to go to this, you know, month by month thing. Now what is our leverage? Now we can reject the operating budget and we need to do it in earnest.

[2:22:48] And the reason is that, look, even though 307 people voted in all these budget items in the May meeting, a thousand and more than a thousand people went to the polls and said, we will not override our levy limit. So the, the, where where that leads to is that, hey, we can't increase our budget anyway.

[2:23:16] So what's wrong with defaulting to, month by month matching of last year? That's where we are anyway. And what you show is we have upwards of, like, $6.6 million a year that we would change, we would benefit from if we, if we did it on a Ek basis.

[2:23:42] Now, I'm not saying that it's easy to do that, and maybe it is some combination, but the range of what we're talking about is somewhere around 2 to $6.6 million a year that we get we have no leverage now, and the townspeople will not vote for it. Override. So is says, you know, or maybe you said we can't cut the police, the fire, all of our infrastructure.

[2:24:11] So I really I will I will be happy to show in ten minutes at some later meeting. Why? Patrick says we carry our weight and then some. We don't get all the taxes. We should only bear a huge burden. And I know, like my life, what we spend. Thank you. Well thank you, thank you. Is there anybody else? James. Carson.

[2:24:39] Oh, Claudia. I'm just. For the James. James. Thank you. James, 84 North Lane Road. Thank you, Mr. White. And thank you everyone for the presentation was fantastic. I just want to say yes, it's going to take at the ground level and start to the finance.

[2:25:06] Committee to really bring out to the town and to the citizens what we should act, you know, the policy. Yes. We should change the arrangement with the other two towns for the school. That's going to be a huge fight.

[2:25:23] Why would the other towns agree to change their formula since they're benefiting? You know, it's going to take an act of kindness from them to say, yes, I doubt that's going to happen, but it should be a discussion. One, two the town should come out at the ATM and vote against these things, vote against the operating budget for the school, start saying no. I mean, every year we say yes, yes, yes, but we're shooting ourselves in the foot.

[2:25:41] Either we all agree that we're going to pay fans, not hundreds, but several thousands every year to our taxes because we have a 90 million school, we have the wastewater. We go down the list. Okay. So either we start saying no or we say yes, but acknowledge, okay, my tax bill is going to go up to $3,000.

[2:26:04] And we just have to say that's what we're agreeing to. So what I'm suggesting is let's start to have the conversation with the other towns. Let's start pushing back the Finance Committee. Lead the way with Liz. Liz needs to be on board. Obviously, you have those difficult conversations. We know the South connector. South County connector.

[2:26:21] That's a problem like we just said in the beginning. Why are we taking over the responsibility? You know, like Mr. White just said, you know, the bird beat their multi-million dollar agency that should be providing the service for now. We three Barrington said, okay, let's create this a pilot program.

[2:26:36] Now we're going to add another division to our town. We can't afford it. We can't afford the Ramsdale. I mean, we go down the list. We cannot afford it or we just say we can't. And on top of that, the reason people leave this town, the younger generation, because there's no jobs, there's no opportunities.

[2:26:55] I mean, we have a tourist industry, but they they're not high paying jobs. You know, we have restaurants, we have stores. They're not high paying jobs. All the jobs that are paid well are leaving. We lost Hazen Simon's Rock. You know, I can go on. So we are in a position that we're adding to our tax taxes.

[2:27:15] We are decreasing our businesses. We're not providing any reason for the young people to say, so what are you going to get? You're going to get the older population who have high for one is really good. Well, generally pretty good at retiree taxes compared to New York or other states.

[2:27:36] The Berkshires is great for entertainment, for food, for the tourists, right. For for shows. So of course older people are going to come here and buy. So it's just a so many problems and we can debate, you know residential tax exemption. We can, you know, make sure the middle class and the higher people pay more because they should pay more.

[2:27:56] That's not the issue. That's not the root problem. We don't have jobs for younger people to say we have the the older generation that has a lot of wealth and we just keep on taxing and spending in schools and wastewater. It's just so frustrating. Thank you very much. Have a good night. Thank you so much. Mr..

[2:28:14] Anybody else? Did anybody else have their hand raised? Anybody else here? Donna. No. All right. Well, that was interesting. Thank you. And any final committee member state meet. Is there a media time? I mean, I guess I have to ask about media time. Did I say anything about that? Yeah, no I don't.

[2:28:37] I right there. Yeah, but you didn't. Yeah. Okay. Committee member statements. Any final thoughts? Anybody? Doug. Michelle. My role. My final thought is that a lot of these problems, it really takes a the the towns to work together. And and I know that that if we start talking about what's fair and what's not fair.

[2:29:05] It's feels divisive to me. Like, if we can start talking about how or when, you know, you know, there are different towns, but we're connected to one another in all sorts of ways, connected through our schools, through our friends, through our families, through the places we go to.

[2:29:22] And in some and we really do depend on one another in all sorts of ways. And if we could start to recognize that mutual dependance and all sorts of ways, then maybe we can start to talk about how we can solve our problems together, because we really do depend on one another.

[2:29:41] And this is why I want I think it's important that when we talk about these problems, that we can try to work as much as possible, whether it be small things or big things, because if you can't work together on the little things, and how are we going to work together on the big things? So I, I don't know, you know, so I would like our talents

[2:29:56] to start up in conversations, but I think that should be based on a foundation that, look, we need to try to work together, figure this out together, because all depend on one another.

[2:30:12] And what can we do to make it sustainable for all of us in South County? And there's a government in Vermont that is for five times got together. And they they got permission from the state to have one government. We have town there based on how long it took to take a horse and carriage in the the 1700s, if it was more than a day, it was a different town.

[2:30:26] And and you know, the I mean, the real way to solve these problems is going to be the consolidate government functions across the distances you can get to when a car that goes 60 miles an hour, and that's going to be the hard conversation over the next two decades, is

[2:30:40] is a place that Great Barrington needs to be a government for way more than just the borders of Great Barrington or wherever you put the seat of government, like, okay. And. And I'm going to bring up the elephant in the room. Okay. The rest of the river cleanup that's going to impact right there.

[2:31:00] And I know people don't like to talk about it for some reason. It's not talked about in Great Barrington. The Leafs going through it right now. And for some reason, it's a dirty word in Great Barrington. And who's the tonic? And I live in Houston.

[2:31:23] That's going to decimate my home value, and nobody wants to talk about it. So tax me, tax me, tax me. But you're not talking about the one thing that's going to decimate and it is going to do it. I'm following very closely what's going on. And my heart aches for the people who are at Ground zero.

[2:31:47] And some of these people live and li all their lives. I can't, I live in my family's home, said my dad built it brick by brick. I was born three days after they moved into the house. I'm honored to be there now and whatever my dad built going to be destroyed.

[2:32:09] And it seems to me, and we're talking about the economy. Nothing's going to designate the economy like this. Do we have them as a speaker? Well, we got to talk. We got to talk about it. And like I said, Bob Jones and Lee, he's just one more member. You must know, Bob, former great born Great Barrington.

[2:32:32] My my mountain. Yes. Yeah, yeah. We want me to ask him. Or would you ask him? If you and I want to discuss it. Okay. The next meeting. Okay. I want to get a plan in place, much like we did with Patrick. We don't want to waste people. But I would like to start opening a conversation.

[2:32:54] Like, Patrick brought up some of these things. He brought up our painful conversation. They heard when you talk about them. But if you don't, we're not going to get anywhere.

[2:33:16] So, but like I said, it really frustrates me when I hear about economic development and doing this and doing that when, you know, by the time that rest of River comes here, I'm going to be in my late 70s. That should be a time where I, I can enjoy whatever time that I have left. And I'm not alone because it's an aging community. Thank you. Community.

[2:33:40] So, you know, I'm just frustrated because I, I, I talked to Sarah Parker about it and it was static Improvement Committee. How can you improve Housatonic when you have this looming over? Housatonic said it has to be addressed down the line that, like you, you brought up, we gotta start making some of these plans now. Not at all. 11th hour, because you can't flip a switch.

[2:34:03] Can flip a switch. Thank you. Do you have any? Just to briefly. Thank you. Patrick, again for all of your hard work, for taking time to come present to this committee and for giving us so much food for thought.

[2:34:22] I think the biggest, the biggest perspective that you shared that I hadn't really fully considered is that we don't need to always bang our neighboring towns over the head with the fact that we're shouldering more of the burden that they that they know it, and that they really appreciate the services that they barons and provides, and that it's in their own interests to make sure that Great

[2:34:38] Barrington continues to provide all the infrastructure, the workforce, the middle class, that that makes all these neighboring towns in South County also great places for us to go visit also. So I think you've provided so much valuable data, a very plausible roadmap for tackling some of the biggest issues of our time.

[2:35:01] And I hope that collaboratively, we can get there and certainly ready and willing to do my part. Thank you. Thank you. And I'll let this more when we talk about dates for next meeting.

[2:35:18] Because I do think in light of the presentation, you heard, as fine like in recent like so there's several things on our agenda already that's like, it's like whether we talked about at the beginning, whether it be the sewers or Cook's garage. But I if we like, you know, like Patrick is saying like, let's go for the watermelon, like, what's the big thing? And then it's, it's the school.

[2:35:34] So it seems like that's something that, how do we get the conversation going? We have to talk with the other towns. So maybe you need to devote a meeting here to come up with some kind of a recommendation. Like the Finance committee.

[2:35:56] Feels like the steps we could take, and present that to the select board or to list, as in, as finance committees, position and just kind of talk through the options that are there that's been discussed. You know, the options that Patrick has presented for us. And then, you know, it seems like what however, we're going to get out of our the in financial crisis. This we cannot get out of it without addressing the school.

[2:36:14] So can we start that process tonight? Yeah. So so why don't we pick a date where we're maybe going to, you know, the, talk, like, so we can come up with a, a in a finance committee memorandum or something like that, or.

[2:36:33] Well, we want to start talking about like, you know, was it Sharon who offered the recommendation that that we make a motion, you know, to incur to request that the that the select board initiate conversations with the regional school committee to take a look at the regional school agreement.

[2:36:53] I mean, we could soon make them motion alone, but do we want, like, what kind of you know what? So yeah, I guess if it's just start a conversation, we'll be doing well, a little premium. I agree with what rail was saying. Having a meeting first and just that's that's our agenda. I know that there's an emergency.

[2:37:14] I feel like Patrick's presentation showed that, you know, it's either all based on number of students or it's all based on property value, and that there is going to have to be some know somebody. And so, so like, it's it's not all that complicated when you think about it. It's like someone just needs to say, we'd like to start this process.

[2:37:37] It may take a year, but you don't have a a good motion to go for a good directive to go forward to the select board. Well, can we just say procedurally, the agreement has a process of creating the regional Agreement Amendment Committee. It's three representatives from each tense about nine people.

[2:38:05] So you could recommend that the select board move forward to create the rack is, you know, what we call it. And that's how it was done before. And they, you know, they decide when to meet and so forth. One is the select board member back in his 80, school board member.

[2:38:24] And the third is a committee at large following a community member at large. So you can use a specific wording if you want to, to follow that. Either we should we should either do it tonight or at our very next. And that's what I do because they're starting you know, they're starting their budget deliberations now. You know.

[2:38:51] And our next meeting is joined with the Select board. And we could we could give some thought to what a motion might look like. But for that meeting. But at this time you want to do that craft a motion right now. Well, I think I mean, you're not going to be here for the 29th.

[2:39:09] No, that's not what I said. I told live, I said, I have a conflict. Right, right, right, right. But I would do my best to be there. But then I didn't hear anything I had no idea about. I'm sorry. Yes.

[2:39:31] I mean, if if everybody in, in theory would like to progress emotion, I'd prefer we took 5 or 10 minutes and did it. Now I'm not. I don't feel ready to. But maybe we could just talk about what the motion would be. All right. Good night. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. What are right. So. Right. Something up? What can we.

[2:39:51] I well, I'll abstain from it because I don't feel like I'm even. Even if you like the way it sounds. Open vote for it, I support it. And if I'm not something so good that you need to support it.

[2:40:12] But do you feel that it should be loose in concept, or do you think we should think this through and say one of the things that Patrick put forward was not all one or all the other, but a transition from what we are at now. I'm just like, we're already going all. And so I, I figured meeting with a dedicated agenda item to discuss this, formulate the motion.

[2:40:38] We want to come. We want to come before the select board as well and formed and repaired. And personally, myself, I'm not. And I've been through this a couple times. I was through that with the regional agreement. I sat in all the meetings and everything. I and I'm not ready.

[2:41:05] I guess that's a wonderful presentation, but, you know, it's just. Yeah, work. But it does feel like if we're going to get the wheels in motion, we just. We just gotta jump in. All right. We've literally talked about the need to start the conversation with the regional school committee. Every one of our finance committee meetings. That's fine.

[2:41:26] But we're making a motion to the select board. Yeah. Giving essentially a directive to the select Board. Well, why don't we instead of perhaps a motion, why don't we frame what we want to talk about at our next meeting about that.

[2:41:45] And then we can that's why we can do like we want the select board to utilize the appropriate tools within the regional school a to convene a.

[2:41:54] A discussion about the about altering the regional school agreement. Can I just say one thing? Sure. And then I'm going to pull back. Pull back. You know what we went through regarding the plan. We really went through that with a particularly before you get in before the meeting and it was discounted. I'm not.

[2:42:20] And not to insult anybody on the board. It was rebuked without a doubt. They look at the material. But you win some you lose some. They didn't. They didn't. So they know what we came forward with. But they didn't go by. And that was very well prepared, very well researched, etc., etc..

[2:42:43] This we're doing it on the spot and it's just something I'm not comfortable with. And with that I'm just going to pull back. And certainly there are four other members here and you can move forward. No, but your point as well taken.

[2:42:59] I mean, I just don't want to have two strikes against us, if you get my drift. Well, let me that still might be. Well, what was our first strike? Was the site board discounting us our recommendations before? Well, for the record, I didn't consider that as a strike against us.

[2:43:19] I think we were brought a you know, when I say strike against us, we made a recommendation and they didn't take it. So I it's just figuratively is I guess, you know, when I'm so I can see both sides and I'm kind of like that's, you know, and quiet while I was quite because I'm trying to think through this.

[2:43:38] But I see the benefit in making a motion now it's to get moving. But I also see the benefit the way the one benefit would be. It would be nice to have Liz in the room when we're maybe crafting this motion so we could, you know, it's ultimately if this is going to move forward, it's

[2:43:54] we need like the select board needs to be on board and Liz needs to be on board. And I think select board will more likely to be on board if in if Liz is on board. It's just us. Took the words out of my mouth. Us moving forward by ourselves.

[2:44:13] I wonder if nobody will follow us even if we write a memorandum. Could this be on the agenda for our joint? I would, and that's why I need. I would like it to be a sole item so we'd really focus on it. But again, there are other members. But I also think engaging ways in the process.

[2:44:32] Our joint meeting that's going to be that's going to be generated by the select board. Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm not talking about that meeting. So I have an idea. Then why don't we do this as early as possible. Let's look at Liz's like let's come up with some dates. We can do it.

[2:44:49] Let's coordinate with Liz and then have a meeting where we discuss the items that we really want list to be there, and the discussion. And one of them will be the school. And then and then there'll be maybe a few more things that we really need. Liz in the rooms.

[2:45:07] And then in that meeting we can, you know, as we're discussing, we can then it's like a right and then maybe a, a wording for the memorandum itself that if Liz is on board with the wording that our, our member, then that's more unlikely that it would, you know, maybe have an impact.

[2:45:30] Maybe that is something I mean, I think calling it so many meetings because the sideboard bottled water article and they went, Liz and you craft the wording on it as she she knows, you know, we could talk and talk and talk, but she knows how to put it on paper. So it's legal. It's it's got to be legal. Because if this progresses there will always be references back to that motion.

[2:45:52] You know, the motion as it was brought before the and his the history on it and whatever. So I agree with you on that. Yeah. Okay. Well then we have to come up with some meeting meeting and make a formal recommendation to her.

[2:46:12] And then why don't we come up with a list of things that we definitely want in this meeting? So of course, okay, let's let's do that first. Yeah. That's cool. So and I think let's try to limit ourselves to ones that because. Yeah. And in this okay.

[2:46:34] In this we already had some, we had definitely some that were interested in But let's, let's, let's make sure that. What would they be school thing like an entire. Yeah. Well let's look at this. We we had we we we this is what we had. The cooks garage. Cooks garage. It's something that I think Liz is coming up with a financial report.

[2:46:56] And so that I think we need to wait for them to do an assessment. But to me, that's different. Like, as I mentioned earlier, I think we want an inventory of of properties, but that's like a request of information rather than an agenda item that seems South Canal County connector.

[2:47:11] I think that I think that's something we need to talk about. And for one, you know, big reason that we talk about South County Connector is the South County Connector is rightly largely funded by state grants. That's approved. That's in that it needs to be renewed.

[2:47:30] If we're creating a department that's like essentially a permanent commitment and retirement benefits to time and benefits and like it was on our we have to pay for that. So for creating a permanent department with retirement benefits and all, like there needs to be a plan of what if the state pulls the plug on on the ground.

[2:47:45] So I would so that's one I think we really need Liz here. And we can ask our questions and that's it. Whatever you do grants in the public sector, it's like always having the finance committee always have to think that grant goes away. Exactly. So just a little that's one.

[2:48:01] So we have a meeting next month for October 28th I remember. Yeah. So some wild back while back ago we we had a possible time on the seventh. Or maybe I had just penciled it in, but I don't know whether or not there's a lot of meetings that week and I'm going to be preoccupied.

[2:48:27] Well, there's an open meeting on training on the night. Right. Which hasn't been. And and I won't be able to attend that, but I spent several years studying it, so I think I'm okay. But, you know, before.

[2:48:44] So in terms of topics, does that make sense? Because the sooner and the soon was the other one is we're going to do in a joint meeting anyway. Yeah. So, so yeah. So let's just do that. How about we talk about, the connector and the school? Okay. What do you want specifically on the school? We want to talk about the process of of initiating a review and reconsideration of the original process of reconsideration.

[2:49:09] The regional school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. And and then for the, the connector, basically, we want a kind of, like, financial analysis, right? Yeah. And to your point, that was one of the other questions I had, because one of the points in that piece was about grant support and what happens if the brand was cleared

[2:49:31] and all of a sudden we have an infrastructure that we end up having to shoulder that, that the state is pulled away from. And I think we should have some data validation if we can, like the delta between the 12% second homeowner, you know, presented versus the 28% that Patrick state of families.

[2:49:50] We should we should figure out some of those really important inputs and that was it called the regional school assessment central school agreement. School agreement okay. All right. So all we have we have the 28th of October as we had that penciled in because Liz told you any of it because we suggested some dates.

[2:50:17] Did she say at all, like any of them that she thought she could make already or. No. I just asked her if she could make October 28th and if and if she can't. Like, what are some dates around? Well, yes, I would say October 28th. Okay. And then let's keep.

[2:50:38] Are there any others in any others in October? I know you've got the wedding. So. So is there a meeting on the seventh? No, I have it was just, you know, something, holder, a placeholder. Yeah. No, I think right. We, we had just kind of discussed it, but I don't think it went anywhere. We did say the 28th. Everybody could make it.

[2:50:59] And we have a number of joint meetings that. Yeah, I am with the select board. So they they do the agenda. They are not going to put us on the agenda for any of our stuff if we. I mean, we could, we could we there's a possibility now it's on the, on the Tuesday the 29th.

[2:51:19] But you work on that Tuesday right. That's your teaching cover 20 or. Yeah. September 29th. I told Liz that as long as after six I can make it. After six, you can make it. All right.

[2:51:37] But what are we talking about? No, I was just trying to think of a, you know, doing something to piggyback, but would have to be before, you know, we could we could always have a meeting before the the Joint Select Board, but then Raya wouldn't be able to. Yeah I know. Yeah.

[2:51:56] You know, I too much like I said, it's just that I experience when you piggyback it other than just approving like a transfer or something. I mean, I would even be, I would. Well, no, I was going to say there's a thing. There is a thing called meeting fatigue. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You will experience that right now. Are you feeling. And that's when I have a bee in my bonnet.

[2:52:15] And then Michelle, just so it breaks the tension to be in my bonnet. Yeah. And everybody cracks up. And if we have a folder on October 7th, well I mean, I, I, I mean, I, I still, I mean, I, I'm, I'm free but I don't know if anybody else is

[2:52:39] and that's a seeing any meeting posted on the 29th. I'm in the camp on the, on the, on the Tuesday, the 29th. Yeah. That's this has not confirmed yet. Okay. Well we're at the 1000 okay. So if you know it. So here's something if, if, if the 29th which we all have in our calendar at 6 p.m..

[2:53:01] If that doesn't pan out for her. Why don't we take it? I mean, that's just kind for some kind of for the select board. We can take it, right? Because she's we know that she's already available on the 29th. So let's just take it right, knowing that I may not be able to be there.

[2:53:17] Oh, that's the one. You can't. Yeah I don't know. Yeah. Things get done on one side I will jump in my car or as it isn't the next Tuesday with the select board. Yeah. I think we should just man on take just all right home in on the 28th.

[2:53:39] I think she would also prefer, you know, September or October. October. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah I can also just give a bunch of. Why don't we give her a bunch of other dates? Because maybe she's busy on a Wednesday like the 27th. Tuesday. If it's after 6 p.m.

[2:53:53] , I'll just, you know, go right from class, hop on a car and speed down, like, 183 and get here, like, on 20th October. 20 October 27th. Speed as in, like, you know, you know, I said run to my car the 27th two. Could you do the 27th? All right. So let's let's put com maybe. Yeah I just want to and it would be 6:00. 6:00.

[2:54:15] That's our that's our plan B meeting am B. Yeah. Plan A would be the 28th at five. Plan B would be 27th at six. Well we could we could do. 29th. Two I could do. Let me think. I'm 27th. 29th. Two I could be at by back by six.

[2:54:33] So that could be another plan B and that would be C 29th 29. I can probably do that too. And that's a planning for the plan board means I can't do it. Yeah.

[2:54:55] And I know I'm on the finance committee, but, I can you just listen to the planning board thing? If you've ever been to a planning board meeting, you better darn well be in the room. Discuss. Sorry. Okay. Well, maybe. And see. All right. We have the 27 and. And the plan C is the 29. I'm kind of checked out between October 9th. Right, right, right.

[2:55:20] First, and keeping in mind my other life's in the public sector to in another town, but. No, no, I know, I know, I mean, we got it. And then should we do some November dates as well? Yes. I, I can't you guys can go ahead and set the dates without my work calendar and everything. You don't have your work calendar or.

[2:55:39] How about that? I don't have my laptop to go about another alternative, which is Monday the 26th. Just just like that. We just have a bunch of alternatives. No, that's. No, no, no. But the 26 is already possible finance because it's so a select board draft policy okay. All right. Where are we.

[2:55:58] We went back to walk over same dates, but not the month. Oh, okay. October 26th I have that the select board draft policy. Okay. But that was one Liz you talked about that were that so I guess just the for October we have 28 and then possibility 27. So that's fine. November.

[2:56:19] What about the first week of November. Which states are we available? Well I, I would say yeah that's right. Yeah. They're just the I would say third week I, I just if there's something that's really critical we can start meeting weekly. But I think monthly is more realistic. Right.

[2:56:40] I mean what I meant is not to meet weekly, but we need to find a date that Liz can come to, like, meet with us. So that's why I want to give as many possible dates as possible that we're available, that Liz can just, you know, pick one, that she can come. Yeah.

[2:56:54] So I thought we were offering her October 27th, 28 and 21. That's not enough. I need to give her more. Yeah, because. Yeah, it's. Yeah. If I knew we were going to project out them, I wouldn't have brought my schedule. No, no. It's okay. Yeah. We're just shooting from the hip.

[2:57:13] Just, you know, let us go into budget season that same time we do. So I actually means go. Okay. Stop for a minute and. But can we ask Elizabeth those dates? If she says no to all three, then can we email the scheduling can do the email, right. If I remember, scheduling can do via email. Oh yeah.

[2:57:33] Under open meaning law you can schedule you just okay then let's do that. And let's just go for those October ones. Hope that the fingers Liz can do one of them. And then if not, then yeah yeah okay. All right.

[2:57:46] But somebody do me a favor of this meeting moves forward on September 29th, which I was out of the loop on that. Right. Because I do want the packet and everything like that. Oh, yeah. So if I can get here much like radio on the other meeting, it's like it's going to be a little tight there. I just want to make sure we have a quorum.

[2:58:05] I don't know that sound, so I don't want anybody to serve back up one quick second. Yes. Next Tuesday okay. The 29th. Correct. I'm assuming there's a meeting. It hasn't been confirmed. It hasn't been confirmed. But we better keep it as a place holder that it's, be coming in from New York City so I can make it.

[2:58:28] And I'm planning. Well, but, I mean, here it is, the 23rd. I can't imagine in the next two days they don't absolutely have a confirmation because they've got to post it on Friday. Yeah. All right. So we'll that we we'll know by Friday whether it happens. We gotta go now.

[2:58:50] If it doesn't happen, do we want to take that spot or. It's not my call because I may not. Yeah I don't think so. No. We just have a three hour meeting, you know, to. Okay, okay. The finance committee next week. Oh, okay. Okay. All right then, if we done. I'm sorry. Anything else? All right. So. Okay.

[2:59:14] Motion to adjourn is on there. Michelle. Seconded. And all in favor? Aye, I all five zero. And the time is. Let's see. 801 yeah. Okay. And and

Great Barrington Finance Committee Meeting, September 23, 2026

Transcript