Budget Workshop #2
up first of public one half of the public works which is Josh Artuso with community development. So Josh whenever you are ready please take it away. Well actually because our budget is so intertwined uh we're going to be doing a dual presentation. It'll be alternating between uh Keith's portion of the budget and mine. Have you rehearsed is the question? No, but this isn't our first go around. So, will you be able to handle it?
This isn't your first gas station. Is that what you mean? [laughter]
So, Keith is actually up first.
Yeah. Okay, Keith. So, the first one, the major topic here is building maintenance. Um I'll just go to the high points. Um, one is, um, you'll see in 2027, uh, we're going we'd have it we're asking for a reduction in capital improvements. These are improvements that you would see across, um, primarily the the town hall and town court. It's not that we don't plan to potentially do some proactive improvements, but we are in the middle of reassessing our 5-year capital plan and some things have come off of that plan. Some things are going to get added to the plan. So, um, you know, but like I said, we are in the middle of that reassessment, and I would envision that when we get to 2028, we will have a more proactive um plan in place where we can properly um show some funding um that's more uh appropriate to what we hope to accomplish. So, just so you're aware, you know, we've we've been more reactionary than we are proactive. And so, and that's kind of been our our mode
of operation for the last couple of years I've been here. And we kind of are going to continue that process, but then we are going to get into a more proactive approach going forward in 2028. Um, I will bring to your attention that um so cleaning services, we're showing that flat. Um uh we do have a uh with our current uh cleaning services there is a they extended last year with um I'll remind everyone with no increase. Um we're kind of showing that same scenario this year. We are in discussions with them right now. We're waiting for them to return back um their input. I will make everyone [clears throat] aware like at this point I've not received I haven't received any negative feedback about our cleaning services. We feel like they're doing a a good job. Um just so in context in 2020 when this was bid the cleaning services of the other two qualified vendors were 20 to 100% higher than what we have um than than than who this service is. So if we expect that to
translate forward, you know, even a moderate increase to take into account for inflation potentially, we still feel that we are getting the best bang for our buck with our current vendor, but we are in the middle of of having those discussions with them right now. Uh that kind of that plays out for um building maintenance. Everything else is status quo. fire marshall. Okay, for the uh fire marshall's office, first two lines we have overtime and the fire marshall salary which um basically is dictated the salary dictated by the uh white collar contract. Overtime we've kept uh flat year-over-year. There is a slight increase in [clears throat] part-time assistant fire marshall line. Um that is to to have an existing part-time employee that I will further elaborate on when we get into the building division. um to have them provide some assistance to wrap up a project they've been assisting the fire marshall's office with this past year on
getting caught up on our annual routine uh fire safety inspections for the variety of multifamily apartment buildings uh churches restaurants of assembly throughout town and like I said I'll elaborate a little bit more in detail when we get to the building function Um computer equipment and licensing is based upon the rates provided to us by our IT department. Um likewise same is true with the cell phone line. Our vehicle operating lease expense uh remains consistent from from this current year. Uh training and seminar supplies, auto maintenance and fuel uh were all kept flat. I I should probably say that um the 2027 budget does not include COLA increases for the employees because uh our three union contracts are all being negotiated currently. So those numbers won't go in until we know them. Um so that's why you see some of the salary amounts are relatively flat year to year.
Okay. Moving along to public works, I think on the next one.
Okay. Uh public works. So, um bottom line at the uh you'll see we're we're looking at a very nominal increase of a couple thousand um year-over-year. Some of the biggest changes to the um to this uh budget aspect is uh we did show an increase in overtime. Uh we've typically ran with about a $1,500 overtime dollar amount. Um, we are asking for a $10,000 increase to take into account um some seasonal demands that we see um and continuing to see increase with uh uh inspections, things that are associated with um construction and applicant um that are uh in front of us. it tends to peak as we're into this middle of the season and it it and there is some opportunity for us to have to um to accommodate that through uh some overtime. A lot of the reviews that we've got
going on right now um with our developments are becoming much more complex. uh they've got they're you know they're no longer building on you know flat pieces of property without any impacts to wetlands or steep slopes. So there's a lot more detailed review that um is necessary and in that review we are still beholden to some timelines um and expectations and those timelines are held you know are are for the with the board. So you know if the applicant meets all the deadlines to submit that doesn't change up when they are able to come in front of the planning board with or without engineers engineering's comments. Um there's just um also and I'll say this is pretty key to us. So storm water. So we've all seen ourselves inundated with some pretty significant events. Those events can happen outside of our regular scheduled hours and it would be advis uh advantageous for us to be out in the field when these events are occurring so that we can be proactive about corrective actions with these contractors as opposed to coming in the next morning or uh Monday morning after a weekend and getting a number of
calls from residents saying that they were you know the the develop velment because of a situation of runoff situation impacted their property or impacted them negatively. So, we'd like to to deal with that. And then, you know, finally, we'd utilize um we we'd hope to earmark some of this time um to dedicate to a a very comprehensive audit of all of our of a lot of our workflows and processes um and correct some operational deficiencies. um and document you know some operating and operating procedures to make us more efficient going further in the future um and without increasing uh resources i.e. staffing. So we that's that's the gist behind that um that number. um other full-time staff. Those I believe just represent the um step increases that are afforded the um those staff members. Slight decrease in some vehicle maintenance just based upon, you know, history. Uh we've also got some computer supplies and maintenance contracts. Um they've gone up a couple
thousand dollars. That's that's an information that's been provided to us by it. Um we are reducing and continue to reduce down our engineering services um going outside of of of the town to to need additional professional services. Um tree removal um that's gone down significantly and when you add that all together it's you know a moderate increase of a couple thousand dollar um year-over-year for this category. Thank you. Okay, moving along to the building department. I'm going to try and do my best to uh try and clearly explain something that uh isn't [clears throat] completely straightforward. Um but as you could see, there's quite a substantial increase in the first line of part-time employees. Um so I'm going to kind of explain uh the rationale for that. So 2026 uh number indicates one part-time employee that is actually our building clerk. Um this was a former full-time employee that retired
approximately 2 years ago and agreed to come back uh on a part-time basis. It really is a full-time workload. However, because this individual is so efficient, um we are able by and large to accomplish all of the duties in a shorter uh work week schedule for that particular employee. Um you [clears throat] might notice two lines down there is an assistant building inspector position. uh one in which I advocated uh for and finally got approved in two 2022 I believe. Um we did fill that position with a full-time assistant. Uh they had since uh moved on to other employment. So when we went to recruit and replace that employee for another another full-time building inspector, it was not uh really generating um a large pool of candidates. Uh but what we did find was we had a lot of um applications for part-time work that current fire uh investigators that have
the CEO certification were looking to pick up extra uh work and they had the relevant skill sets and knowledge to conduct inspections. So at the at the advice of uh the director of personnel at the time, we decided to uh attempt this approach with multiple part-time employees funded out of the full-time assistant building in inspector position. Uh and what that essentially does is uh remove any expenditures for insurance uh you know healthcare pension etc. We've been we've been under this model for about a little over a year and a half now at this point. And in meeting with the staff and in conversations and looking at our um statistics in terms of the number of permit applications, the number of inspections we're conducting, and the revenue that we're bringing in, it is my it is our collective goal to try and fill that assistant building inspector position again with a true full full-time employee while still
being able to retain the three part- timerrs that we have hired and used for basically additional assistance uh coverage on absences and vacations etc. So [clears throat] essentially what I'm asking for is to retain the three part-time employees and that's what's reflected in the uh building department uh part-time employee line. Um, [clears throat] and essentially one of those three would also help out with code enforcement. So that's what's reflected as code enforcement as part of this unit. Um, we currently have one code enforcement officer dedicated for a town of 45,000 residents and 19,000 properties, which uh, in my opinion is is a lot for one individual to handle. Um, so I am proposing to repurpose one of our part- timerrs that has been assisting with building inspections and reallocating their um support to assist with code enforcement. Um now if you look down to the uh revenue of building permits
so for this current year we have 120,000 budgeted and in running some numbers uh 2026 year-toate permit fee revenue has exceeded $215,000 um just in the first 7 months. So, we definitely have seen an a sharp increase in permit activity. I think that the housing market being as competitive as it is and and that's been the case for quite some time and with mortgage interest rates remaining relatively high. I think a lot of folks are opting to stay in their current home and conduct additions, improvements, renovations, etc. because we have seen a large uptick in in building permit activity. So I've in consultation with Paul uh in looking at our past uh 3 to four years of revenue, we felt pretty comfortable in raising our revenue. We still feel it's relatively conservative, um, which we like to do, but I thought it was important to reflect additional revenue to help offset some of the additional expense that I'm requesting.
Yeah, typically had average between 120 and 130,000 a year. So, uh, obviously having a big year this year, but I think the 150 is pretty reasonable.
How much of that revenue is attributed to Federal Life, if any? That's a good question.
Uh, well, there should be none actually because they paid us upfront and we allocated over I think 3 years.
Okay.
And that was completed in 2020.
That's a big I think for not including Fair Life. It was a big number. Wow. That's awesome.
Yeah. I did kind of vet that cuz I wanted to make sure there weren't any big ticket projects that would throw off that projection. Um there was one the Mckelpen project is fairly large. Um but yeah, just in the month of July alone, uh we brought in um $86,000 in permit revenue in one month.
Wow.
Um so yeah, [clears throat] the staff has been uh working their tails off, if you will. Um there was a new code, a New York State Building Code, the 2025 code that took effect in in January. there's a lot of additional inspections that are now required. Um so in an attempt to be able to comply with all of the regulatory requirements, um we really really would like some additional staff support in this particular division of our operation. Um did do you want to add something? Yeah, I'd like to just highlight that prior to the moratorum going into effect. Um, and really exempt from the moratorum was we have Aberdeene phases 2 and three. They've been approved. Um, they're a significant building, you know, single family home project. We still have, you know, building that's occurring um as part of Westwood. We still have building that's occurring as part of Meadows 2 um as well as Bellotera. those phases are still in the their infancy right now. Um and we have Sienna reserve that is anticipated starting construction of that development um in the first of the
year. So you know because the the mortorium moratorum has gone into effect but it has not changed probably the number of potential single family homes that could get built within the next 12 to 18 months. So, so Josh, we obviously can't predict this, but if it keeps picking up when you might then need more part-time help to manage the workload. I imagine there's a balancing act between like we only get the stuff done versus we can only have so many more bodies. But,
right, and you know, I think we're we're satisfied. you know, we've trained up the part- timerrs that we brought on board, but really, you know, they give us their their schedules vary from month to month depending on their full-time jobs. So, the intent was to try and have one of our part-time employees present each day so that there was always that secondary person to help assist the building inspector. But what we found is that given scheduling conflicts, we don't always have the luxury of having everyone's schedule align. So the feedback I've gotten from the staff is that it's it would be really important to have a consistent assistant, and I think that will solve a lot of our issues, but the request is to just retain some of the part-time assistants and fill the vacant full-time position.
Okay. Thank you. Um, and just before we move on, uh, I don't believe there's really any other major changes. Again, the code enforcement compliance coordinator, that is our code enforcement officer, that increase reflects a step increase that they're due. Uh, equipment and licensing is u based on the numbers given by it. uh professional services, you'll see quite a reduction that is related to primarily to Fairlife and third-party reviews that we anticipate wrapping up by the end of this year. There might still be a couple outstanding invoices that go into 2027, which is why um we still show something, but I I suspect that that number will go down in the future as well. Um, town code compliance. That's uh the fund that we use to procure our third-party vendor to perform uh certain activities if we're not getting results from the property owner. And then those funds are actually invoiced to the property owner. If they're not paid back to the town, those those charges become a lean against the property. So So that money actually
comes back to the town. Um, office supplies remain the same. Cell phones did go up a little bit based on current rates. Um, vehicle lease expense remained the same as did uh dues and conferences, fuel, and uniforms. So, after all of all of that plus the increase in revenue, we're still showing a slight reduction from the current budget. Uh then we can go on to the zoning board of appeals.
Before before going there, I see the operating lease for the vehicle. Some departments are looking at owning versus leasing. Are you finding that the lease is still beneficial given the usage for your department? Well, I know Keith has been doing an analysis um and we are very cognizant trying to determine, but from my perspective being here at at the offset of the program, our department was unique in that we had a fleet of six or seven vehicles that were approaching 20 years old. So that we looked at the capital purchase to replace everything at once versus the leasing and we opted to go the leasing route. Um, do you want to I know Keith has been digging deeper into that and
yeah, we this was our first year to look into the the the idea with going with this lease is that as we build up equity in these vehicles that we have, [clears throat] we should be able to cash in that equity essentially and when we go to renew on a new lease that we would see a reduction in what that costs year over year, right? So, this was kind of the first year where it started to make some sense to to do that evaluation and we did that across a few of our vehicles. And what we found was we're probably not quite there yet. Um the because taking into account we would see a reduction in the actual lease itself and it was a a few thousand. But what we end up having to do is outlay the same three or four or even $4,000 just to transfer the equipment that's on those leased vehicles to a new leased vehicle. M. So, we weren't we we ended up in the hole $1,000, right? So, now we need to look So, now we'll look at the
and then that was only on a couple cars.
So, when it made started to make sense, now we'll start looking at the following year and the conversation have that same conversation about okay, now we maybe have more cars ready to go off lease or to be traded in. Is there when are we starting to see a benefit? So, we are we are starting that conversation. And I'll be honest, it's taken me almost exactly 2 years to understand this lease cuz it's it was a little abnormal to me. But now that I do and now that we have actually gotten the the the right spreadsheet, I will say from the lead, we can now track this ourselves. Yeah. So, we're close. But I mean I think Jennifer that's a good point is we're seeing that across the board of like and Ricky or not you talk about like the challenge of that spreadsheet like finance can help with a default spreadsheet for everyone
to do this cuz I think it's going to eb and flow over time like as interest rates go as lease rates go you might see 5 years where it's better to lease and then 5 years where it's better to buy. But to your point Jennifer I think we've got to look at that as a whole of how do we save money because we don't really care as a town. Like it's not like we have an opinion and residents care if we lease or buy. He just want us to make the best
financial decision.
Yeah.
Yeah. Absolutely. Well, and to be fair, you know, I think the the uh the vendor certainly provided a a a provided information that they thought made the most sense to them and we had to just really break it down and make it really get them to understand what made sense to us and how to see this information. We're there and now we're I think I feel much more I I feel better prepared to have these conversations going forward.
Excellent. Thank [clears throat] you.
Thank you.
Okay. Continuing along with the zoning board of appeals. Um they're really the only change is the reduction of $500 legal expenses. We've brought that down to zero based upon historical usage. um and with the new contract that we have with our current um law firm. So um just a slight overall reduction on that particular section of the budget. Uh likewise planning board um compensation to the members remains the same as does the 50% of the recording secretary. Uh and again [laughter] we've basically kept everything flat with the exception of legal expenses which we've reduced to zero. Um you will see the smart growth zoning revisions is being reflected as a $150,000 expense. Um we did just last week submit the uh grant application to New York State by the deadline. Um but nonetheless, we must reflect uh this in
our budget as Paul has told you.
Yeah, we'll hold off on showing the revenue till till we know for sure. Um so that that main um zoning revision is the main increase for this which is shown here and we're very hopeful that we'll be successful in our application to to uh offset that cost. And the next section is really uh employee benefits that I think Paul can speak to.
Yeah, I put together the employee benefits. Uh we've seen an uptick in retirement contribution costs. Um obviously uh some of these are showing as flat uh only because there were some there were excess funds in the budget. Uh so I'm basing it off actual. So what was in the budget in 26 was sufficient to cover us in 27 uh for social security workers comp uh the medical insurance uh premiums as well. Um, we're expecting a pretty good size increase in medical insurance cost. I based on actual I bumped it up about 12%. So, it's all built in there. It's pretty consistent across all the funds uh that the town has. Then the the first item under revenue is uh the large item. Uh 1.2 million is sales tax. Uh we do receive a portion of sales tax in Monroe County. Uh it's paid to us on a quarterly basis and it's currently being split between the general townwide fund. This fund here which is the general partn fund and the highway partnone fund. Um so I I do reallocate it each year uh
to maximize the benefit and uh we actually in had a pretty good increase here of 42,000
[cough]
your your [clears throat] grand totals, totals of everything. When you look at the amount raised uh to be raised from taxes, you're actually down about $94,000 year to year, mostly because of revenues are up substantially because of the sales tax. Um I did appropriate fund balance of $63,000, which is about 230,000 less than last year. So basically we take money out of our uh surplus or savings account per se and uh use it like a revenue to to balance the budget. So we've actually brought the amount that we raised for taxes from the parttime fund to zero and [snorts] that allows us to use sales tax money over in the general fund, the general Tom White fund. So, we're we're trying to keep that uh going as long as we can.
I think that concludes our budget. Are there any comments or questions?
I got nothing.
No, I think you got good plan in place. So, we'll see how they
Yeah, you guys do a great job.
Runs through the year. If you're going to make some changes, that'd be great. You know,
I like the fact that you're you're stacking up where you feel necessary while at the same time reducing cost. So,
that's our goal.
That's the only comment I have.
Great. Thank you.
Very good.
All right. Up next, uh large clearly the largest department of the nation. uh is our town clerk, Denine Mah. We better change our signs.
All right. You ready for me?
All right.
All right. So, we're going to start with the tax collection department. Um, there's no changes to staffing this coming up year. It's comprised of one part-time clerk, one full-time clerk. Um, and any adjustments to salaries, um, is based on step grade increases, longevity, and then it'll also be adjusted once we know any of the cost of living adjustments when if and when they're made available. Um, one of our largest, um, expenses is our printing and postage at 33,000. Um, of that total, there's about $15,000 that's estimated for reimbursement from the Webster Central School District, which will be posted and realized as revenue um once that's received. Um, this line item, it's also been adjusted for um, the annual postage increases as well. We just had one um July 12th. I'm expecting I'm anticipating that we're going to have another one next year as well. Um for department expenses, this is comprised of office supplies like our paid stamps, our envelopes, legal notices, um and our printer maintenance,
and our money counter maintenance. Um there's an estimated school reimbursement for this one as well at about $1,000. Um for the revenue for the tax department, it's estimated at about $180,000 a year. Um on average, we're doing about $183,000 looking back at the last four years. Um it's based on historical collection, but it's really difficult for us to determine exactly what the amount is going to be year-over-year. Um, so we just do our best to estimate that line item. Okay, on to the town clerk portion of the budget. In regards to personnel, there's no change to staffing. It's comprised of one full-time deputy town clerk, one full-time license fee clerk, one part-time clerk, and one part-time receptionist. And let's see, what else do we have? Um, no computer equipment replacements are scheduled for 27. Um, so we see a little bit of a decrease there. Um, printing and advertising. This includes our legal notices that are required to be published in the Webster Herald and the cost to update the town code that
typically occurs twice a year. Um, I cushioned this line item with the code change changes expected from the comprehensive plan by $2,000. um for any of like the zoning um changes that happen. Um I did go through the physical like the big blue books that you'll see like there's one up at the deis. Um I actually was able to take out five of those town code books that are no longer being [clears throat] used throughout the different departments. Um, so I I was unable to change it per the contract with um general code, but going forward after this year's contract, we'll be able to see a decrease for that one. Um, one of our largest um items is for postage. Um, the postage line item includes costs with refilling our Pittney Bose postage postage meter. We typically refill that about six times a year. Um, we do have a vendor for bulk mailing. Um, and we also have our annual USPS postage permit to mail the Webster Webster today quarterly publishings. Um, the increase you see here, that's due to postage increases we can
anticipate to occur. um for records management. Um this consists of our vendor provided service for document shredding when town records are up for their um retention period. Um for machine and computer contracts line item. Um, this includes our general code laser fee support, town clerk software for fees and licensing, two copier leases, and the Pittney Bose postage machine lease. Um, subscriptions and publications. This line item is for e-code, which is the online version of the town code, which can be found on the town's website. Um, for conferences and transportation, this will be used for my attendance at the annual New York State town clerk's conference. the annual New York State Tax Receiver Conference and travel to Monroe County Town Clerk meetings which are held every two months. Um, for Easy Pass, the cost for the Easy Pass tags, it's $21 each. Um, and we are continuing to see a decline in Easy Pass sales. Um, so we're going to be decreasing the purchase for new tags.
Um, there's no change for our background checks for pedallers licenses. um our new process to obtain national background checks on all applicants. It's working nicely for 26. So, we're going to continue doing that in 2027. Okay. For revenue, um for the town clerk's fees, they're comprised of the New York State DEC hunting licenses, fishing licenses, marriage licenses, and miscellaneous fees. Um for return check charges, um those are charges for return fees. is we charge $20 um for any checks that return from the bank due to insufficient funds. Um next line item, that's our easy pass sales. Um and like I've said, we're seeing um a continued decrease in easy pass sales, so we're lowering the estimated revenue for this line item. Um for dog control fees, those are charged to the dog owner when the animal control picks up an atlarge dog. Seizure fee is $40 for the firsttime offender and boarding is $35 per day for the firsttime offenders. Um the next line item that's for the Webster Central School District tax collection reimbursement. Um this is where any of the reimbursements we
receive from the school district will be posted. So like postage and there's different supplies and things that they'll reimburse us for. Um, okay. For dog licenses, um, we continue to partner with animal control, which, um, they have helped us to increase the number of dogs being licensed in town, and we've been working together, um, to get through our backlog of unpaid renewals. Um, for the town license fees, this is comprised of pedallers licenses of $4,000 and waste hauler rough use licenses of $5,500. And the last item for the town clerk permits consists of special event permits of $2,700 and one mobile home park permit of $300. And that is all I have. Anybody have any questions?
For those that aren't familiar with this, could you just explain to us the aspect of longevity for the employees?
Yes. So, I think it's after 5 years
um of employment with the town um they'll there's a $100 increase.
Uh correct. I think it starts at $500 in uh usually paying December. If they have 5 years with the town and then at that point it increases uh by $100 per year. I think it goes to 2500. So, it would go over the the next 20 years. So, I take that. Is that a contractual issue that's negotiated?
It's part of the white collar union contract.
Okay. Um, the only other question, and thank you for your explanation of everything tonight. The $15,000 that the school district reimbures us for. Is there any labor calculations in that? because I know you spend, you know, your your team spends a lot of time at the counter with with the taxpayers.
Unfortunately, it's how the town law is written that the town is responsible for collecting the school taxes. Wow.
So, we can only get reimbursed for, you know, like if we have to replace our um paid stamps or um you know, different supplies and things like that with um our money counter machine will split the cost 50. county. Like if you go to Ontario County, uh I know Victor Central, they they collect their own. Um so
Wow.
Yeah.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. The only question I have, and it's not really specific to the town clerk budget, but I think the the big difference in the budgets right now is they look pretty flat year-over-year because of all of the contract negotiations for the white collar and the blue collar and the police. Is there any I I know those things are a little unpredictable of how they're going to go, but is there any indication when those when we might have insight into what those increases are going to look like?
Not at this time.
I think it's too preliminary at this point.
It's a little too soon.
Yeah.
But to your point,
it's going to change. It's not going to be as flat as it appears.
You're right. And at some point soon we should know what the ask is if you understand what I mean.
Correct.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, even now that they're still going up,
you know, almost every department's going up, the costs go up and you know, even you try to do a great job of keeping it low and
it still went up.
You don't control the USPS.
Yeah. For a lot of it's all basically postage related. And in 2027, my plan is to really do a deep dive with the postage and see what how we can get creative to maybe lower our postage across any town mailings. You know, is it a little bit cheaper to maybe mail a postcard than it is like a number 10 window envelope? You know, just kind of do a little bit of research to see what we can do to bring that down a little bit. And then separate to this budget, just a thought looking at this is perhaps looking at the dog life, the dog control fees in conjunction with the police department and the animal control is like is our cost go up to monitor with the New York state mandate. We might want to then charge residents more. Sure.
If we charge if we penalize a,000 bucks a night from the state and we only charge a resident 10 bucks or 20 bucks, like you know, we might need to look at that. I believe in 2025 was the last time we did an increase for the dog seizure amounts and the boarding costs. Um, but I can work with animal control to see if try to do, you know, compared to other relatable towns within the county to see like where we're at. But I think even like with the pedallers fees permits, like you get to a point to where if you keep increasing them, are they even really going to pay them? you know, so it's a fine line.
Yeah. Well, thank you. That's, like I said, tangential to this.
Mhm.
Thank you.
Okay.
Thanks, Denise.
Thank you.
Up next, Chief Cole present police went right into dogs into the police department that oversees the dog control, right? in here. It's
almost like we planned it.
Thank you.
Same for both the same form. There's one section at the bottom that didn't get carried over that. We'll talk about that. How are you?
I'd like to just throw ahead.
No, no. I'll sit here. I just got a little closer.
A couple scenarios.
Yeah.
Mhm.
Correct.
I'm going to need yours at one point. You can have a
idea. Good. Seven. 10.
Okay.
But what does it mean? Mhm.
Totality is what I really
that's what matters.
Correct.
Mhm.
All right.
Totality.
That's a lot.
Yes.
Ready to go?
Yep.
All right.
Let's go.
So, uh, this form is, uh, just a little expansion off of the one that, uh, provided by finance just to give you a little bit additional details on the major components of the budget. doesn't go through every line item and add uh uh additional comments, but I think it helps to explain some of the um larger sections of the budget without me just throwing words at it and people not being able to see some of the tangibles.
Hit the highlights.
Hit the highlights. Yeah. So, to get a little bit of lay of the land, uh obviously have your 2627 uh request, the differential is the column to the right uh change between year to year. Overall, the ask uh between last year and this year is up $11,251 um for uh any revenue adjustments. So that's just the increase expenditures. Underneath each uh request for uh 2027, there's a percentage. That's the percent of the request. So uh my salary is 3%, the officer salary is 66.6%. So twothirds of the uh request for the police department budget is uh officer salaries.
We should probably say then 26 uh the retirement buyout amount was built into this number. Uh and 27 it's on a different line.
Uh correct. Yeah. So uh starting with my salary line there. Obviously there's been some discussion already this year about uh how that's calculated and where that comes from. Uh currently it's built off of uh base pay, longevity, education, which are uh drawn from the 1000 club contract. Uh the retirement buyout, as Paul just pointed out, was in this budget line for 2026. Uh it's down under um the employee benefit section. Now, for officer salaries, as uh Councilwoman Wright pointed out, this is without any contractual increase projection for the negotiations that are currently underway for the 1000 Club. And the same is going to go for the uh clerical salaries under civilian staff as well. Currently our uh officer salary accounts for uh 3 uh five people. So 35 positions from captain down to patrol officer. Uh when we did our 26 budget, uh we had a temporary increase in headcount to get to that uh 35 number. Uh my request this year is to
take that uh temporary increase and make that a permanent increase to the authorized staffing for the police department. Uh so that's the only [clears throat] real permanent change being requested in the budget from a increase perspective. Um those 36 positions that uh are being requested would constitute the captain, the two lieutenants, the seven sergeants, three investigators, two school resource officers, 75% of which are reimbursed by the school district. the one task force officer is the officer assigned to the DEA task force uh which we'll talk about again a little bit further down the budget and then 20 patrol officers. So that's a increase of plus one officer position. The SRO projection on the salary side is about $160,000 uh reimbursement from the school district. That doesn't cover the the backend benefits. That just in relation to this uh line here just explaining some of the increase. Uh so there is an increase from 26 to 27. That's because a step uh increases where we talked about where officers um through their first six years of employment uh as they uh mature in experience they gain an additional uh pay step uh based on their anniversary date. So it just shows um the impact of
uh step increases over the projected uh next uh four budgets. As we move down to the salary compensation for retirements, uh this one here is a little tricky to calculate. Uh we project 100,000. There's years where we don't use it. Like so far in 2026, nobody has retired from the police department. Um I included a little bit of statistics in here to show you um why we uh budget that amount and why we kind of uh have trouble calculating when it actually uh is going to be uh exercised. So starting with the first chart there that shows the most senior people in the organization. [clears throat] Uh the retirement eligibility year for them and years of service based on next budget year. So as you see there'll be four people eligible for retirement. I mean you can take mine out of there. I'm already retired. Um so when it comes to the buyout, it's not relative. So three people that would potentially be um exercised on this line item. Uh that's an increase of two. Uh the chart to the right shows uh the last whatever that is about 20 retirements. How long many years of service they had um before retiring. You can see that most employees uh leave as soon as they hit their 20 year um of service with the state retirement system. Um there's a
couple reasons for that. Uh one is sometimes for a second career. Uh, another one is we don't have a um heavy retirement incentive to stay beyond the 20-year like some agencies with a additional retirement contribution that happens uh for each year of service after 20. Uh our last contract negotiations, we looked to try to improve that a little bit with our healthc care strategy that uh the longer an employee stays, the less they pay in retirement. um which may be why the one of the reasons why we see like uh officer Hurley for example at the state the 25 year mark or will be uh projected in 27. Um so historically people leave uh when they're eligible we have a number of people eligible for next year. So uh that's what we're looking for underneath the 26 number. That's the average those are the last three payouts we uh had per officer that left. uh contractually they get their vacation, their comp time, and their sick time based on a a um negotiated formula. So, uh each officer gets that buyout. So, that's why we're looking at uh at least $100,000 projected for 27. If I'm going fast and you want to ask questions, feel free to interrupt me. I'm just kind of rolling through. Uh officer non uh non-mp uh holiday pay. Uh
next line down uh that shows us um the averages as well. Uh officers if uh they all took it contractually in pay, that dollar amount would end up being almost $200,000. Uh most officers don't. They take it in comp time. Uh that allows them to have additional time off uh when staffing allows. Uh so we usually see uh an average projection um well below that number. So, we're uh actually decreasing that number this year to to meet uh some of our averages that uh over the last couple years. Police overtime is obviously a large percent of the uh budget expenditure at 6% right there. Um the graph shows the actual overtime uh costs over the last uh 10 years. Um that number usually works kind of conversely with the officer salary line. A lot of time officer overtime is increased when staffing is decreased. Uh it's not always a one for one because we have additional reasons why officers are uh not operational whether it's uh through uh a long-term injury or illness, whether it's through an administrative process for discipline. U there's a number of reasons why uh people aren't uh operational but we're still paying for them. But overall um
there's a a relationship that's uh inverse for each other for overtime and um the officer salary
for overtime. How's that tracking through 2026?
So again uh it's pretty close to what we see on the averages here um for the actual number for 26 uh year to date. Uh I don't know if I have that one with me. Um I don't think I do. Uh right now we're associated in the officer salary line. We're projected to be about $170,000 below budget in the officer salary line.
Okay.
Um I would say we're probably going to be over in the officer overtime line uh by a dollar amount less than that. So it may be in the 140 to 150 overage, but I believe it'll be less than uh what we are uh savings in the officer salary line. Uh all right. So grant uh so overtime it comes in a in a bunch of different uh categories. Um we have the traditional uh line item for overtime. Uh we've separate outed a couple extra ones. Uh grant reimbured overtime. uh when we run like a state uh uh seat belt or um uh impaired driver uh crackdown, when that money is reimbursed, we separate out the expenditure side of it as well to um try to match it uh one for one. Uh just to skip below that, that reimburseable police compensation line was also created for that purpose where uh that is intended to uh separate out uh overtime that is being reimbursed by either a private entity or another government agency. The officer comp time buyout uh that is um another contractual benefit uh that they
have uh at the end of each year. their comp banks that uh they can acrue through working overtime or holidays converted to comp time uh is uh mandated to be bought down to 80 hours but they can buy it down uh further if they wish. So it ends up uh being a large expenditure that's kind of hard to project because uh the officer selects that u buyout uh amount uh towards the end of the year. uh up till a few years ago, that dollar amount was lumped into uh total overtime uh and that made it very difficult to track our overtime expenditures over the course of the year when we get to December and all of a sudden we're putting a large expenditure into that line. Uh and um blowing it over the threshold. Okay, scroll down to clerical salaries for me. Uh so for clerical salaries, there's a little bit of a ask here as well. It's not a headcount ask. Uh so there's a couple things that are uh happening with the clerical salaries. Um one uh our property clerk is uh projected to um retire this year towards the end of the year. Uh she was grandfathered into the stepping grade uh that she was in. Uh the new position is going to move down to a 22 uh pay grade
uh step one. Uh so there's a a savings that come comes with that. um transition. Uh my ask is to retitle uh a one of our full-time clerical positions from a clerk to a uh crime analyst. Um we've been working with uh one of our clerks who has an aptitude for that uh to work on helping provide uh statistics and investigative support um for the officers and it's uh created a very large um impact uh operationally. So it's a it's a huge skill set for us to have. Uh and the majority of her work um is uh balanced probably 50% between uh the analyst uh support capacity and helping uh with the administrative support function with uh discovery and things like that. Um so uh with the change to uh the workload uh the focus and the likelihood that um that work may result in producing evidence that will be submitted into uh a criminal process. Uh and the possibility that the um analyst would have to testify in court uh which would uh provide a higher level of um uh skill and knowledge than a
standard uh clerk position. I feel it's appropriate to retitle it. So, it's not a headcount ask uh to increase, but it's a title change that has a different step uh engraved to it. So, um my request would be that that crime analyst position be authorized at a uh 221 as well. Just like the property clerk, I see that their uh job duties being very similar uh both handling the evidence and producing material for a prosecuted uh prosecution um that they might have to testify to. Any questions about that? Okay. Uh clerical overtime. Again, very minimal. Um unless you want me to comment on uh most of these little ones here. There's there's not much uh change between them. You can see that those next se several have no dollar amount change per year. Um one for discussion ARPA bonus. Uh that was a contractual benefit for uh the officers as part of the last contract negotiations. Obviously, that's not uh carrying over to 27. So, that's uh not in the budget. Uh computers, there's a slight increase because of uh I'm sure every department's talking about the increase in uh computer costs and equipment. Um capital purchase, there's a increase in that budget line.
Uh that will be a temporary 27 increase for a booking room security upgrade. Um we uh have identified uh a deficiency in the way that our floor plan is laid out. Obviously, our police department was uh designed uh uh a number of years ago. So, as we continue to evolve our operation, uh we've looked for different ways to improve um the flow and security associated with it. So, um, really what that is is putting up a wall to help isolate the the prisoner processing area from, uh, common walkways and pathways where officers may be walking through where they're still armed. Uh, so it's to increase the safety of everybody, um, in the building. Uh, capital purchase and miscellaneous, there was a temporary increase in 26 uh, for body uh, war and camera purchases. Um so 27 that's reducing back down to um uh a traditional level. Uh capital purchase firearms uh slight increase just due to some of the equipment costs that come along with it. Uh tech services uh stay in standard. Um when it comes to vehicles there's some increased uh costs there. uh our fleet. Uh managing that is a is a major task uh both from a uh uh rotation of um capital
assets like uh keeping them uh at a at a mileage level and service level that allows them to be uh used for emergency operation. Uh most vehicles you can take well over 100,000 miles these days. Uh but from a um performance and insurance uh perspective uh we try to maintain uh that 100,000 benchmark as the replacement uh window uh for vehicles that are used for emergency pursuits and emergency driving. Um so really what we have is a a pretty stringent three vehicle rotation a year in order to keep the fleet operational. That obviously gets impacted um based on fleet vehicle accidents and unknown mechanical failures and things like that. Uh this year alone we've had to do a couple purchases out of like drug asset forfeite funds that I'll cover uh to help cover some of the costs of uh vehicle operation. Question sir?
Yeah just regarding the firearms $12,000. I know it's a small portion of your budget. I'm just curious as to what's determining factors as to how long you're using the the fire the pistols and their firearms whatever it is.
Yeah. So the the pistols um just went through a upgrade. So they're those are usually a bulk purchase that's usually done through uh either a grant or asset forfeite funds. Uh sometimes it's done out of tax dollars, but um the last one we did didn't include tax dollars uh for the most part for the firearm upgrade. Um this is more for the cycling of the patrol rifles. Um we have over the years um uh annually implemented new rifles into the program uh to get to a point where so when the when the first program first launched um I I would say the active shooter era. So right after Coline in 1998 uh the police department got its first uh rifle. So we got two rifles that were um uh M16 in style. no lights, no optics, no equipment associated with them. Uh and over the years, um it is built out to then it went to a pool rifle for each vehicle, uh where the rifles were being stored in the vehicle and different officers would
drive them. Uh each of those processes were uh the best effort at the time, but they aren't uh industry standards and they're let's see and they're not um what I would consider uh best practices when it comes to handling firearms and storing firearms. So over the last couple years, we got to um uh that kind of threshold where we're able to individual issue rifles to officers. Uh that does a couple of things. uh one that brings the rifle out of the vehicle into the uh the building storage so that it only goes out under that rifle that officer supervision. It brings that rifle to that officer's um uh specific setup and uh optics for back lack better word calibration where they're sighting it in.
Um for those that are really into firearms and shooting, uh a rifle uh with iron sights really needs to be zero to a specific individual. um when you can take a a red dot optic and and have it um used by multiple people, but when you're using iron sights, especially with that kind of uh equipment. Uh so really what it comes down to is if an officer in the town of Webster is going to deploy a patrol rifle, it's probably a worst case scenario for us uh and we want to make sure that uh our process um is at least meeting industry standards, if not meeting best practices. So really what we're doing with that capital uh fund each year is um continuing to evolve that program. So each rifle that's uh issued to an officer has um an optic on it and a light on it uh so that they can um better deploy it under all circumstances. Um the next evolution that we're probably going to get to is um evaluating using sound suppressors on the end of it because when officers are training, we get a lot of noise complaints at the range for uh the the neighbors to it. And two, the hearing protection cuz when they're going to deploy it in the real world, they're not going to have access or time to put in uh hearing protection. It uh it's counterproductive to everything else that they're doing deploying that rifle.
So, um, this next evolution will probably be, uh, starting, uh, one or two rifles a year to swap out to and start including those accessories as well.
Great. Thank you for that. Appreciate it.
Yep.
Uh, so under capital purchase vehicles, the other other thing I want to add to that is, uh, we also identified a, um, need to improve our command and control at emergency incidents. Uh so this year we used um some of our drug asset forfeite funds to put in some command post uh features to uh the back of uh the operations lieutenant vehicle and um one of the sergeant vehicles. So we're going to continue to expand that. Uh basically what it allows is um in a command post operation. It'll allow to have uh some screens uh whiteboards and uh accessories that will help the command officers track resources and manage the incident. Uh what we've also found with our drone operation um that that has become extremely uh impactful to uh quickly resolving and um safely resolving some of the incidents. Uh we're looking to outfit a vehicle that's going to have the screens um for the drone operators to be able to operate uh more effectively.
So what how many drones do you currently have?
Three.
Okay.
Yep. And uh there a couple different sizes based on different different functions. [snorts] Um we have uh a number of pilots pilots now in each shift uh that go through the FA FAA licensing. Um and anywhere from a pre-planned event to an in progress uh crime, missing person, things like that. Uh they've already had a huge impact uh on being um successful outcomes there. I would say uh CE versus WI. That's typically allocated to updating radar units and roadside screeners uh for professional development. Uh that would cover costs for the uh international uh police chief conference and the state uh conference along with uh the dues for the National Academy Association. Uh cost for retired officers, I ended up taking that out for 27. We've been budgeting that. I know it's only $500, but uh we hadn't expended it in the last uh four years. So, uh, I didn't include it. Slight increase to seller telephones, which again, uh, our our cost is probably a little bit higher than most of the other departments. We individually issue phones to officers. Um, that's been, uh, extremely important uh to make sure that all the communications that happens in a critical incident is contained on agency
devices. Uh, there was just a recent court ruling out of like the Virginia area where officers were using personal devices for workrelated communications that was captured on body camera. Uh those officers were ordered to turn over their personal phones for forensic examination. Um we're trying to uh not only we not we're able to avoid that now. Any conflict of using personal devices um in a a mobile field office essentially the officers work on the on the road um primarily and uh the phones and individual issues allowed for uh a lot smoother uh communication. Um, next biggest one is probably the service contracts. Um, software as a service models uh has been extremely important to help uh maximize our efficiency without trying to add too many um uh additional capital purchases or headcounts. Uh the big ones there, uh Lexipole, that's our policy manual. Um by switching to a managed policy manual through a provider, it allows us to have uh that in a cloud-based format. Um so from the start uh when laws uh are changed or case laws developed uh the policy manufacturer uh provides the updates they have a lawyer that writes
the guidelines. They have it reviewed by industry u um uh professionals and then it gets pushed to the agencies for implementation. We can tailor it to our specific needs. Once we publish that it goes out to the officers on a platform that they can access through computers, through their cell phones. um that allows them to look up policy um out in the field in a very expedient manner. Um one of the bigger benefits that come along with it is that it has a daily training bulletin that um we tailor for our organization. Um each day they get prompted with a scenario where they have to read the scenario and they're pro provided options that are based on policy. They're allowed to answer those um uh policy questions and then it gives policy explanations along with it. So, um, for us in the law enforcement world, uh, making sure that we have, uh, appropriate policy, appropriate supervision, and appropriate training, it kind of captures all of that into one spot for us, um, so that we have that, uh, uh, fully documented and fully implemented.
With that, how often are the policies up? How often do updates come through?
Uh, pretty frequently. I would say almost uh, every week there's some sort of tweak to a policy. Uh it may not be a major change, but uh sometimes it's uh uh based on um a change in best practice, a change in technology. Uh sometimes it's just a wording change where um somebody's reviewed it and decided that uh the way it's worded is either ambiguous or confusing. So um they they provide a a clarity uh or clarification update. Couple other ones on there. The uh the Motorola is that body worn camera uh transition that we made. Uh so when I say born cameras, it's not just body warn camera, it's also um incar cameras. So in 2026, uh for the first time as an agency, we implemented in-car cameras. Um it's from the same manufacturer as our body warn cameras. So they work uh integrated. Um example would be when officer is driving down the road, uh the camera's always recording uh at least a 30-se secondond loop. So if there's an accident, that accident's captured on camera. Um otherwise um when the officer turns the lights on, the camera will activate. It also activates the body warn camera through the same signal. So it takes some pressure off the officer and it allows us to start capturing information um as soon as the the
incident is initiated. Uh those incar cameras are also license plate readers. Uh so they uh also provide the functionality of um uh processing the license plates that are being captured by the camera. uh that helps officers on patrol, it helps them on uh traffic stops, uh things like that where it's capturing that information. So, it was a big um uh improvement to operational capability uh by switching vendors and um so far that we've we've had a lot of success with that. Um again, the the other ones, power IIA, power action, those are help track track officer incidents. Uh the DAGEL one is a supervisory training first line supervisors and up. We've contracted with um another industry professional. Uh it provides uh an immense amount of knowledge for our first line supervisors to so that they understand their role in the organization and their importance in maintaining a positive uh culture and ethical decision-m um uh in their job and in their subordinates uh job. So, um, again, it's a big section that sometimes people can see is, um, excess cost, but, uh, we've tried to really tailor, uh, those programs to meet our needs, and I think they've been very
effective. Uh, a bunch of these other ones here are all fairly, uh, flat across the the year. Uh, vehicle repairs is probably the one that, uh, fluctuates the most. Um, but on average, there's about $16,000 reimburse from insurance. Uh I think this year in 26 we're actually double that. I think we're at 33,000 this year cuz we've had a number of fleet vehicle accidents. Uh we had two we had two in one one incident uh where one vehicle was total, the other one had uh I think that was around $15,000 worth of damage to it. So
it was a bad weekend.
It was a bad weekend. It was a bad call. So um tires and gasoline, again, that's another one that fluctuates. Uh it's hard to project that based on vehicle usage. Um, it provides a little bit of, uh, cushion, I guess, overall. Uh, but I think it's fairly fairly manageable there, the dollar amount. Uh, clothing and expenses. Um, again, the one of the biggest expenditures out of that line is the ballistic vest uh, cost. They're on a 5-year manufacturer rotation. Uh, so each officer um, gets a new vest every 5 years. So that's um uh around right around seven vests a year right now that we're doing. So uh we're working with Perma on a new grant uh that is associated with outer uh body cu outer uh carriers uh to help offset some of those costs and we'll continue to expand that um officer assistance program. Uh we've had a little trouble getting this off the ground uh with the sheriff's department. Um I still would like to move forward with that. So it's in the budget for next year. I'm hoping to have that up and running before the end of this year. Um, but that's uh where they'll provide uh uh support for officers um to help debrief critical incidents, daily stress, things that uh so they don't build up to a a critical
mass and have a negative incident. Uh training expense, slight increase there. A lot of that is due to either cost of the increase of the the training that we're sending officers to or um uh travel costs associated with it. So, um, hotel costs and things like that if the training is out of the area. Um, everything else there is, uh, reduction in the contractual uniform cleaning. Uh, so the overall total appropriation request, uh, is up about $11,250. Um, under the revenues there, um, they're mostly pretty flat. We did a slight increase to the school resource officer just based on averages and increase salary costs. And uh overall with the increase the the revenue the amount to be raised by taxes is only the only ask is uh 51 bucks. So um again that's without um the impact of colas for 1000 club and uh white collar for the uh administrative staff. Correct. Okay. Questions on that?
No, I just have a general question. Um because I know there's a certain amount of officers that you're recommended based upon population I believe. How many are you short and I mean active duty officers. How many or are you at where you should be? I I would say that that's uh somewhat of a loaded question because uh the the number that you typically hear is one per uh thousand residents. Um so if you go by that number, we're well under. Uh but if you look at that from a perspective that really depends on uh environment and uh severity of calls and things like that um I think that uh in order to provide a road patrol function and uh investigative need were where we need to be. I think if we wanted to push more like uh one of the places where we probably uh where we used to have full-time staffing where we could have an increase would be a community services function uh to help with neighborhood watches, explore programs, things like that. So, um we've been focusing our effort uh on the public safety and investigative function of the organization uh and trying to mix those other things in with uh on duty staffing and and meeting those uh as available. But um I would say that uh New York
State does have a program where you uh could do uh some outside analysis on on headcount. Um but we haven't gone through that process.
Yeah. Well, you're going to have the the I would say the best opinion based upon your agency. So I appreciate that.
Can you email us the spreadsheet you did?
Yeah, please. When you get a chance that we can
Yep. Uh we got a couple more sections though. Um, we got animal control next. Okay. Yep. So, for animal control, uh, really the only there's there's two two really adjustments here. One is the animal control officers and part-time assistants. Um, that's just kind of taking money from one hand and putting it to the other for the most part. Uh, there's um an increase in hours. Uh, basic so we we used to have a full-time animal control person. That's what that top line was. And then there used to be uh on call to help cover nights and weekends. A few years ago, we went to just a part-time model where we have two lead animal control officers and then uh others that are assisting with nights and weekends. Uh so Barb and Tracy are our primary animal control officers that are um every day trying to uh [clears throat] return the phone calls, answer the calls for service, find and care for the dogs um with the support of the other people. So there's a little bit of uh increase to the animal control officer's expense based on uh the time being committed uh and a little bit of adjustment in the um support there to just equal where the dollars are actually being spent. Um the other increase there is an equipment that's for a new vehicle. uh eggs and
markets as part of their uh change in uh law um u added a requirement that the vehicle transporting a contained uh dog needs to have air conditioning and heating. So it is no longer um permissible uh coming up to the deadline here to have a dog transported in the back of a pickup truck, which we're currently doing. So um part of the expenditure is to replace that vehicle with one that um is in compliance with exit markets. So we had some preliminary quotes done and we believe we can do that for uh the budget request and not other than that the dollar amounts for the uh the animal control are are pretty standard. Uh the animal control seminar I just want to u put a feather in their cap for that. Uh Barb was asked uh by eggs and markets to uh resume hosting the statewide animal control officer seminar. Um for a number of years uh we did that uh once we lost the full-time staffing that uh that coordination went away. Uh she resumed that and it's been a big success. Um they get animal control officers from all over uh the state to come to that. um they uh spend uh um between $4 and $5,000 uh in
expenses getting people lined up. But um this year in 2026 um they had uh I believe it was like $7,300 in profit from the the registrations and um participation with it. So uh it's a lot of work on their end, but it brings some very important training to not just iron control officers, but regionally. Um, one of the big highlights this year was they brought in um um Dr. Subnik to talk about uh the emotional impact of animal control officers caring for animals that are then either injured or or who are injured or then euthanized as part of the process. So, um it's uh a big undertaking for them, but it has a big impact for the community. Uh dog controls fees and conference income. Uh I just want to comment uh kind of reinforce on the comments from earlier about uh how we're charging fees. Um the ones where we're charging back to the residents that $35, those are typically the people that show up and uh claim their animal within a relatively short period of time. That's usually we have them for one night. Our people care for them and that's the fee that we're providing right now. Uh we're we're housing dogs where we can. So we have a dog out in Hamlin at the moment. uh they're charging us $45 a day. Uh but
that's $45 we're not going to get back. There's nobody that's going to claim that dog at this point. Uh there's nobody to pay that fee. So that's a town uh town cost that we're undertaking. So uh the dog that's out there uh I believe we're just over $1,000 right now in in boarding costs with the town of Hamlin. Um so the fee structure I think kind of has two aspects to it. One is the the fee the money that we're actually going to recover and the other aspect is the money that we're not going to recover. So just talking point there.
Good evening,
though. That helps like understand the full evolving moving piece as we all try and deal with this new issue. Thank you. And the problem.
Um, all right. So, for animal control, there's the increase. That's primarily the uh the vehicle.
Mhm.
Okay. Uh, and then for the personnel cost, we have to go back to your sheet for that one. Okay. Yeah. Uh the police uh have their employee benefits segregated. Uh we've seen a pretty healthy increase in retirement contribution over the past few years. So that compared to 2 three years ago, it's up quite a bit. Uh health insurance, we projected about a 12% increase. uh uh a lot of the other things we're able to keep relatively flat because we as I said earlier we base it on the actual expenditures and the budgets have had some extra funds built in. So um we're trying to use those up and get it back closer to actual. So yeah, just one comment I just want to
make on the medical insurance for police and police retirees. Um so one of the things that we we recognize is that officers retire uh early uh at an early age and uh then have a long uh period of time where they're under the uh retired uh benefit section. So one of our strategies is try to um encourage a longer length of service. Uh so the way we've done that so far contractually is the the decrease in retirement contribution for uh retired employees if they stay longer. Um, one other way to potentially discuss that is the the addition of a program that uh does retirement contributions. So, the state offers that. There's some police agencies in our area. So, it's just a uh a talking point moving forward that um there may be some benefit in investing in that program if it helps us uh particularly in the retirement uh retired employees u medical contributions or expenses. That's it. That's all I got.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Chief.
Thank you. Thank you.
All right. Up next is the wastewater treatment plant, uh, also known as sewer. And we have outgoing, uh, Chief Rick Connealy and the new one of Dwayne Hillaker. I'm bringing the entourage.
Um, so um, as you know, as you just stated, I'm on my last uh, few weeks here and so we figured we bring Dwayne to sit on his first one, although this is my first one. So, um, kind of, uh, my first and last and Maryanne has been a huge help. So, some of the questions maybe if we get really into the weeds, she may be able to assist in the answers. So, all right. So, um,
the highlights,
we'll hit the highlights. So, number one is, um, as I presented in front of the board, um, a bit ago is a new org chart for the facility. So, and that was defunding that position. um the deputy commissioner um professional services, we went from uh nothing budgeted, but actually we did spend some uh funds out of that this year and that was for campus construction was being taken out of that line item. So with some of the pro some other additional projects that may come up, we need some consulting or professional services. We figured we'd bud put a a budget line item in that of 5,000 uh small increase or a new line item of credit card processing fees because we're taking payments through credit card now. So, um we've seen some activity in that we so that's good. Um [clears throat] summer help, we kind of this is a lumped in line of a summer help intern is we actually have a summer help working this uh year. She's been a hit at the facility. um everybody wants her to stay permanently. Um but uh we get offers sometimes of engineering students or college students that might be in the environmental field. So it'd be nice to have um um so we're keeping this in there kind of boost it up a little bit
so we can kind of um pay them there while they're uh finishing up college and maybe kind of lure them in. increase in uh highway project labor and that was because we're going to have the highway pave two pump stations for us. Computer licensing uh and equipment went down. Uh we're only budgeting for one computer uh for next year. capital purchases for uh the collection system is um we are looking at getting a new station's truck um back lot flusher which will help um our flushing crew go out. We got a lot of back lot sanitary through town of Webster and uh very tough to get to with a flush truck so you're dragging hoses um very long distance. So, this will help us take care of those back lot sanitaries and a crane for our utility vehicle.
I have a quick question before you go cuz you skipped over the compensation for employees and
we have workers, don't we?
And and it's $100,000 more.
We're asking for another maintenance mechanic,
which would eat up a bunch of that. But also, we have budgeted in uh cola just in case. So, we have
and step
and step increases. So we we budgeted in just in case the contract negotiates come through. So we are have it budgeted in case there are increases
which differs from our other lines other departments.
Oh
right.
Okay.
So on that increase how much is for the employee versus the what's the employee?
Put in 3%.
No. What's the the new employee?
Oh a maintenance mechanic.
Yep. The payroll. Uh it's about ballpark
55 got benefits.
Yep. On to that. So thank you.
Thank you.
All right. Sorry for that.
Um looking at the screen and then my notes also. So um okay. So we did capital purchases. Um vehicle leasing expenses. We are down uh we're one less vehicle to lease. We traded in.
No, we had budgeted to maybe buy another vehicle or lease another vehicle. This year we didn't. So that cost for next year is the four vehicles that we actually lease now
and um everything else is pretty much steady until we head down to repairs to system. Um we did have some uh pretty good meetings with uh finance director and uh John our liaison uh council male in regards to some of these areas we can kind of do some reduction. And this was one of the areas that we hit with uh we dropped at 20,000. Um [clears throat] and the repairs to system that's we that's out in the sanitary system. We never know what's going to happen. I know we have some issues with hedges. Um that's renting a Godwin pump. That's all different stuff at our pump station. So it's kind of a variable and you never know year to year. So we're um hoping this lines up. Um maintenance at lift stations. Uh steady wet well cleaning. We dropped. This was another area we kind of did a little cut to. Um, drop down to utilities. So, this is where kind of Paul jumps in with estimating our utilities.
Yeah. Um, gas, electric have been trending up. Um, so I bumped it up on the collection side and as you'll see on the treatment disposal side, we bumped it up quite a bit more because uh we're handling much more flow from Fairlife, but we'll we'll get to that. And we did after discussing with you the contingency for the uh collection system from 40 to 60. Yeah, we currently have two part-time employee uh budgeted. We are currently utilizing one of them somewhat. The other one is for the um lab director. There's been some health issues. He has not been able to take advantage of that or us take advantage of his um expertise, but we're hoping that still uh comes to fruition over time. pretty steady compensation for the uh facility is the operators kind of had some transition over the last year um not only with um my position transitioning out opening up an assistant chief position. Um we've had two operators leave for better opportunities which we've always encouraged that we don't want to hold anybody back if they got some better
opportunities and that's an indication of the industry. um a lot of the 4A and plants um needing them and they're retiring and they're not being able to fill them. So, as you breed them and you uh bring them up and get them trained, there's the chance that they may move on to a better opportunity.
How many 4 do you have currently?
What's that?
How many 4As do you have currently?
Well, we um have myself, Dwayne, um Tim, and Jordan who is one of our new hires. He just passed his 4 A. So, we now have four but three after I go. You're very fortunate to have as many 4 as you do. You really are. So, you guys have done a wonderful job in recruiting. Um,
another note on that, we've had a maintenance guy that's been training and he just passed his 3A, didn't have a license, and passed his 3A. So, he is now a 3A licensed operator. Um, another promotion from within. We have another maintenance guy that is training and we hope to get him licensed. So,
and that's all training that he does while he's um employed with Webster. Is that correct?
Yeah, we do have a training budget for that. So
that says a lot. It really does. So
it's really nice when you can promote from within which is correct indicated right next to me here.
Um uh chief uh plan operator will be a reduction with me leaving and uh Dwayne stepping in at the lower scale capital purchases. Um, this was another thing that we've been trying to do is with the current uh budget, our current project, we have a contingency budget and a client savings. So, the decision between um, Councilman Cahill and Paul and our staff here was to kind of pull a lot of these items we are looking to do out of it and take it out of contingency, which is already bonded for or is already on that.
That was a huge reduction.
We're voting on that tonight. So, I just want to commend your entire team
for putting as much um work into that so it it comes out of the budget and it's going to come out of this budget
so the rateayers don't see it.
Exactly. We don't have to get that give that money back.
Um computer equipment licensing obviously prices of that and some additional users uh going up $2,000. um increase in cell phones. Um as the chief touched to earlier, um Dwayne will be getting a separate cell phone for the chief operator. Um I had never did that. So um but also we are adding cameras to the cell service. Drop down to printing. So these manifest, it's a new line item for the outside waste. will be starting to take in hopefully on a more um expanded level soon. Um but there will be printing aspect to that and hopefully we'll be using a lot of those which means we'll bring in a lot of revenue.
Let's hope so.
Yes. um background checks, um additional employee hirings, um the security system alarm monitoring, um that will be securitas, that's the doors, the gate, uh the new automatic gate that will be um operational soon and the cameras around the facility. now down to chemical use, which is the everinccreasing cost, but um can never bank on that price as it goes out to bid. Usually, we have one-year contracts. Um actually, you used to used to have be three-year contracts. The chemical companies don't like that anymore because of the volatility in the industry. They kind of they don't want to lock in for 3 years anymore. So, it's really tough to get them to commit to that. Um but with the new processes, we'll be using a lot more polymer. So that kind of inc that increased by 64,000. Um ferrachloride that price continues to go up but along with taking out more outside waste means more phosphorus. Um we do not treat phosphorus that's a pass through. So we have to precipitate it out. So that'll be additional uh usage of ferocchloride. Sledge hauling was another one we are looking at keeping the same knowing that we are going to eventually reduce that.
That was another discussion that we dropped that 100,000. We are seeing um just a quick example through the month of June um the first half of the month we ran the just the belt press. We didn't go to the dryer yet. The second half we did the dryer. Uh we were able to have a reduction in hauling monetarily by 80%. In that second half of the month just by running the dryer because of the loss of water content. So, kind of showing the positivity of that
and hopefully we get that running uh more frequently.
And that that dryer building just so everyone's aware that that was you brought that in, didn't you? Wasn't that your idea? where we felt with, you know, with our cost of hauling going up that was kind of the driving factor of this really to be the
So, I believe that was a, if I read it correctly, the building itself was like $7 million for the building and everything,
all the equipment, everything.
That's going to pay dividends. Oh, yeah. Very, very quickly. So, thank you for for that, Rick.
Yeah. Haven't seen it. It's quite an impressive operation of how that all works.
Yeah. And and we are putting the RFP out soon and that'll kind of be a three-level RFP. Um worst case scenario, somebody's going to we're going to have to pay somebody to take it away. Obviously, you'll be a lot less as I just said, we 80% reduction. The second level will be if someone just wants to take it away for free. That would be great. Now, we've eliminated that cost altogether. Best case scenario is if it becomes a product that someone wants to pay us for and probably that down the road if we get more baseline data what the value of the nutrient value your nitrogen phosphorus and your potassium in it. If that looks good somebody wants you get a third party in they manage it they bag it we get revenue and they get revenue kind of like a a partnership in that but that's that would be best case scenario. So is it possible once the drier if I'm hearing you correctly that number that 360,000 or that 250,000 can be reduced by 80% or become
zero
a revenue zero and a revenue stream.
There's kind of three levels to it. We've even kicked around ideas of utilizing some of it with parks and rock or the highway, you know, in inhouse first and give it away and maybe save them per pine fertilizer for anything or use it in some mixing compost as they do that. So, or other areas farmers just come and we load them up and they take it out. So, a lot of different avenues to it. We're looking for the reduction right off the bat.
Excellent. um telephone uh reduction from 21,000 to 4,000. I got to say this is really due to um Adam, our uh collection foreman and Maryanne. Um I'm going to You should get the accolades. I'll let you describe this a little bit.
So at our 22 home stations, we have copper phone lines and our frontier bill was over. Real quick, could you talk to the microphone for the the recording? Sorry. So, we have 22 pump stations and they they have a copper phone line and our frontier bill was $13 about $1352 a month and we've been trying to come up with an alternative to save that money. So, Adam was actually the one. We also have Doyle keypads for the alarms at all of the pump stations. He spoke with the gentleman and we were able to put cellular at all of the pump stations, connected to that alarm, and we took the phone line out. So, we're no longer paying for the phone line, and the Doyle bill only went from like $29 a month to $44 a month.
Oh, wow. [clears throat] about
we got rid of the $1,300 plus phone line bill and we only went from maybe $600 to $900 for the Doyle bill.
About a $12,000 savings. Great work.
We need to find more of those throughout the town.
Yeah. And we did not pull the the hard lines out or the landlines out first until we made sure the cellular works,
right? Yeah.
There was an overlap.
Yes. Um laundry service, additional employees. um to uh take care of the laundry service heating contract um that will be um looking to take care of all the added HVAC systems and there's a doz system which is a dedicated outside outside air system with a lot of ventilation going on in these buildings especially the dryer building and our new um um headworks building and the solids building. So, um, looking to have the company that actually installed all these to have them, uh, control the maintenance contract for that. Um, next one down that has a change is pump repairs. We have more of them, so a lot more maintenance. What we're finding though, unfortunately, he has all this new equipment. Each one has their own oil that they have to use. It's proprietary to that, but it's specific to that piece of equipment. Obviously, we like to have redundancy and uh kind of uh use a lot of the same, but in this aspect, we're finding they each have their own unique oil that we have to use. Um conference stay the same. And two, [clears throat]
next uh change was equipment cleaning. Um another one we decided knock down uh cut it in half. Let's go down to um uh refuge removal. This was a reduction because it became a townwide contract. Medical supplies and safety equipment uh increase of 4,000. We're we needed new purchase two new AEDs for our facility. So that's uh specific to that $4,000 increase. Lab analysis. Um, now with the dryer, uh, with, um, our part 364 hauling, with, um, the digtor, with all that, we're we've had some increase in in-house lab testing and sending lab testing out. So, that, uh, accounts for that increase. Again, here's the cost for the utilities, which um, Paul put those numbers in. industrial pre-treatment going from 5 to 7. We have added Fairlife um to the sampling schedule and we are um expecting the Kelpin to be online at sometime in 27. So that will be another one that will be under our pre-treatment program
and that's it for just employee benefits which
comments are pretty consistent with what I said earlier. Okay, that was quick, huh? All right, on to revenue. Um, so currently I just want to kind of give an update on where we're tracking for 26 um versus what we're predicting for 27. Um, obviously we got a late start in some of these revenue streams of uh bringing in Fairlife waste or any actually septage waste. We have not received taken in any. We are bringing haul in Fairlife waste. Um they are bringing um two trucks a day. Actually the first several months it was only one truck a day. We are banking on five or six trucks a day which was 65,000 gallons a day. Um which correlated to that 1.3 million plus a little other waste coming in. But we didn't want to bring talk about any other haulers that was just going to be upside. So, we're going to be conservative because we knew fair life was uh pretty much guaranteed. Um we have been collecting um from them for the Halden waste, but also our first two bills to treat their effluent
is um oh that's the next line item. I'm sorry. We're at about we're way we're going to be way over budget on that one and under budget on our Halden waste, but I think uh combining the two together we have budgeted 1.98 million and we'll probably be one around 1.8 million. So we are making up and if we really get open a lot of these haulers will be coming in so we may be. So I think we're going to be good on those and um first year is tough. We have no history to go on.
Y
um
I have a question about fair life because you said fair life is guaranteed. Is fair life guaranteed? Do we have a contract that it's guaranteed? Because I thought they had options.
Guarantee was a strong word, but they have that much and they want it's we're the closest one. Yeah,
it's it will save them
to bring it to us. So, and our price is uh is very competitive with around the area. So,
thank you.
Not guaranteed. I'm sorry. [laughter]
I wish it was
life is guaranteed. You're right.
Taxes and death are
um but just an update on the We are behind on that one. But on the next line item, the fair light sewer rents, we um we have currently collected $871,000 in the first two quarters and we were only budgeted for $590,000.
Um again, very conservative on that. So we're looking to pre projected somewhere around 1.3 or 4 million on that. So we'll be way up on that, but again lower on the haul in ways. Commercial sewer rents um going down a little bit. Um, and the residential sewer rents going up. And these where Maryanne was working her numbers, the 3500.
Oh, that's Yeah, that's
Or was that Paul?
Paul in.
Well, you give me the units. I
give I come up with the
figure it out. [laughter]
Same with Xerox. Obviously starting to decrease a little bit there. Um, septic waste, we haven't taken any in and we are projecting at about 260,000, but I think that's a very conservative number.
Penfield again, reduction in units on that. And I think that's that's on M side.
That's the onm side. And I don't know if you want to touch on the rates on where we're looking at the rates. Yeah, for O and MM we're at a rate of 14136 which is down about $23 from the previous year. Uh but you'll see that the uh capital rate went up about $15. But overall [snorts] the rate is down about $8 when you combine the two. Is it a capital? Which one?
Capital.
Yeah. So, the rates consisted of two pieces. The operation and maintenance piece and the capital piece which uh covers uh certain improvements and the debt service on previous projects. So, again, we're looking at um building improvements staying the same, energy uh engineering consultants to increase a little bit. We are potentially going to have to have another project um with our permit limit for total residual chlorine. Um we are tasked to um drop to a limit of 0.25 milligs per liter. We're currently at two. The way we are set up with the village uh line going out and us tapping or combining there, we cannot sample any further than that because now they're discharging into that. So we we don't know who would have a violation there if something happened. So to meet TRC we have to have a lower dose and you need decay on that but we also need to add enough that we can uh treat the fecal California ecoli limits. So we're in a catch 22 there. So we're looking at um we will have a consultant we have a study going on right now that we had to um send into the DEEC giving our options
on how we will meet that in the next 5 years. But there will be some probably some consulting going on on that to make sure we find out to the right one. There's limits of there's we tried to get away with no change. Um there's creating a contact tank which we would utilize the old village clarifiers which is nice to have that excess capacity in those tanks there. The other would be UV disinfection would be very very expensive uh for the town. So, um, we needed some consulting. Uh, so this would be a, um, we boosted it out 15,000. Capital improvements at the pump stations. Uh, we dropped cut that in half. Um, the rest stayed pretty steady. Building items dropped 6,000. And the serial bonds are in your gig. Yeah, I've included uh the serial bonds uh the historical serial bonds we have outstanding and the bond anticipation notes which are for the Bosber Road pump station and for the wastewater treatment plant project. Uh we actually just uh sold the ban today which we closed on August 25th and uh we got we got got a good net interest rate of uh around 2.8%.
I had budgeted 3%, so it's a little less than what we have in the budget. So, we're safe on that one. Um, so that's just a one-year borrowing. Uh, and I would anticipate in 2027, August of 27, it'll be rolled into a serial bond. So, the the capital rate, you include everything here. Uh, we do have a transfer of 200,000 into the capital reserve. uh a couple other smaller transfers. Um similar similar revenue to what Rick just talked about, but it's on the capital side based on the capital rate uh which is u about $108 uh per edu. [snorts] I think that's covers it. Any questions? No, I don't have any questions. I think I've exceeded your qu allowable amount of questions given our previous budget meetings, but I do want to say thank you to your team, for Paul um for your patience in going through this process. I greatly appreciate it and I think
you've done a very admirable job addressing not only my questions but also the budget. So, thank you. Thank you so much for that. You're welcome. I think it's exciting to have the um plan up and running and the revenue is starting to come in. It's starting to yield. It was a huge capital investment, but I think it's important to remind um residents that there was a $20 million grant. Fairlife paid a very large initial tie-in fee. Although that's coming over I don't know how many years, Paul. 10 10 years.
But that decreases the overall capital investment and it's a revenue generating operation which could become a very profitable revenue generating operation for the town as as it gets fully once it's fully um in service. everything is fully in service and Fair Life is online. Um,
yeah,
not to mention building out Xerox when when Xerox is finally built out. It's that that will have a very huge impact on um revenues to the town and then ultimately the tax rates for residents.
Yeah, I'd say same thing. Thank you, the four of you for John. This is a incredibly complex budget with the overlay between capital operational the sewer rates. We've kind of glanced over here, but truthfully behind the mechanics of this, there's a lot of moving pieces to this that it is very complex. So, thank you for going through it and do what you can cuz it's Jennifer, you're right. There's some upside, but there is just a lot of mechanics to get there. So, thank you for your patience and doing all that.
You're welcome. And as you touched on all the intricacies of that and this project that we're going through and we're able to reduce the sewer rate so I guess that's a
for the whole team.
Yeah. Positive. So
it's a good thing.
Thanks gentlemen.
Thanks team. Uh up next
my entourage.
Yes.
I think you have the biggest entourage right? That's right.
That's a bonus. You got to know
they're going to carry me out.
Maybe put that on your retirement party cake. Like I have the biggest entourage of anybody. I do want to see you riding on Dwayne's shoulders out of here. [laughter] I don't want to see it. Well, you won't have to see it. He'll be a book. All right. Up next, uh, we have library director Adam Trout for the Webster Public Library. Hello, Adam. Hey, Paul. Hi, everyone. All righty. Um so um uh similar to sewer um but you know the library is a little different. So the budget that I'm presenting uh this evening has been preliminary approved by the library board. Um we are not covered by any of the um uh collective bargaining uh that the rest of the town is. Um so we do have uh colas and steps although um you'll note that um the steps that are awarded at the library are 1% step which is well under the 6 to 8% steps that the town usually awards for uh step increases. So those are included in this
budget um but they are not as um dramatic. Um they are on the other hand a little more regular. Um so uh the first one up is uh the library director's uh salary. That's uh mine. That's up uh 3% for the cola and 1% for a step. Um the salary personnel is up approximately 3.1% both for the 3% colas and I think we've got two uh salary employees with steps remaining. Um hourly personnel is up uh 3.3%. Um that's primarily due to an expected minimum wage increase. Um the library, much like parks and wreck, uh relies on a lot of um lower hourly wage um staff. Um so this uh reflects a 3.3% increase um across the entire hourly organization. Um so uh that's that is our salaries. Um equipment purchases are are we're going to remain flat. Um automation capital is the same. Uh conference use we in um started budgeting for as a li as an organization 2 years ago. Um I see no
reason to increase it at this point. Um but it is um uh librarians of a certain uh generation were not required to maintain their professional development to keep their licenses. Um however um uh more recent graduates are required and so this is one of those things where um we're investing in our staff um and uh as we heard as you promote um and train people up they sometimes leave for better jobs but we feel that this is an important um component. Um the next uh and by the way please stop me I'm going to try and go fast because I know you all have another meeting after this. Uh the telephone is currently budgeted for 10,420. I'm leaving that in for 2027. However, the board, the library board has authorized um uh an investigation into alternative funds. Um I do have a project that we're getting ready to schedule that should bring this cost down significantly. Um, so I'm hoping to generate some savings through um a capital investment in our phone project um which is primarily going to be funded through um state aid I was able to uh obtain this year. Um so
just kind of an asterisk by that number. Um the copy lease stays the same. Uh credit card usage and fees, membership and notices is going up uh by about $500. That's our um membership to the New York Library Association. um building rent. Uh this was the last year in our lease where we have a 5% escalation in the rent. Um so this is a a 2026 is a partial or excuse me um 2027 is going to be a partial year for the increase. Um and then 2028 be the first full year. Once we hit that full year of increase, we will break half a million dollars a year on the current building. um which includes the next line down which is the common charges and the taxes. Um uh next up is postage. Um minor increase there based on expected increases at the postal service. Um building service and contracts. Um older buildings take more to maintain. Um that's really all that's reflected there. We're trying to balance that to actuals. Same with rentals, repairs, um automation, which is really our our uh membership to the Monroe County Library System. Uh we often refer to them as our cost shares. That's going up. Um part of
that is that the um uh cost shares have been remained relatively flat. Um and then every couple of years we see a small increase. Um so uh that's that's reflected there. um software database and subscriptions. We have this year a new database called Get Setup um that's targeted primarily towards older adults uh mostly technology but there's some really cool interesting other live classes on there as well. Um the foundation is generously paid for that this year and then um as kind of per the arrangement with the foundation they'll fund a new initiative and then it is our job uh as the library to try and build that into a sustainable model. So, I I would say that we're hoping that it's successful, we're planning for success, but if it doesn't get the usage or the attention that we think it really deserves or is costs, um we may find some savings there next year. Library materials, uh or as I call them, collections, very different from collections in pretty much every other profession. Uh we've got that 10,000 slow march towards our peer libraries. So, that's the increase there. um library databases. Um this is just a reflection of inflation and our subscriptions. Uh cleaning supplies and maintenance are the same uh with office
supplies. Office supplies is going up a little bit more because of the added investment in the collections as well as a uh annual um private um grant. It's really a donation um of about 50,000 that's targeted towards collections that we started receiving in 2022. um we have more stuff that we need to put on the books. So, uh it's just a a formula of how much stuff we have to process. Uh natural gas, we've seen some savings, so I tried to balance those to actuals and electric. Um I we're expecting an increase based on the approved RG& um increase rates.
Usage is down, but the rates are
right. We we've significantly reduced usage uh over the past 3 years uh through the LED conversion which I was able to secure uh state funding for. Um and uh not that I could have guessed that RG& was going to go up 26% but um that was certainly the intention was kind of futurep proof our uh utility bills.
Well, can you imagine what it would have been without that program?
I'd prefer not to. [laughter] Um with our water, we've been pretty flat. Um, so that's it for um our major line items. Any questions there? No. Paul, do you want to repeat yourself about [laughter]
No, I don't. But uh yeah, [clears throat] there's some slight increases in employee benefits. Retirement contributions have been trending up. Uh medical insurance. We're hoping it'll be a reasonable increase this year, but we won't find out really until September. Uh but we think overall we have the cost covered here. So,
and thank you Paul for that.
Yeah. You want to touch on what you're doing from a financial planning standpoint um next year looking ahead for your potentially building a new
you could say the lease ending.
You know when the lease ends whether they stay there or they move. Well, no. Yeah. I'm just saying, are you putting anything aside next year?
Yeah. Yeah. So, every dollar of savings I've been able to generate since 2022 has gone to the fund balance. Um, and I know a discussion that we had, I think at the April board meeting, you had and and this is actually the next line item.
Um, you had a a question in that April board meeting, which is how do we pro if we're going to invest, how do we protect that investment so that it goes for the intended purpose? I think was the spirit of your of your comments. So Paul and I established this uh capital reserve fund. Um the the Now I will say caveat, the library board needs to ratify that adoption. Um but that's on slate for our uh meeting next Wednesday.
Um we put in a figure here. Uh it was a guess. Um the library was uh actually initially made a more conservative request. Um but uh through discussions this is a number we landed on. I think the library would be happy to help offset future borrowing and future tax burden through an investment of this uh um nature. Um but right now we're looking at 150,000 which is actually more than I think it's 57% of our budget increase. Um, I think everything else including employee benefits and salaries are only about 40 37% of our of our increase. It's a if you take out this 150,000 the library's increase overall year-toear is 3.3%. Well, your increase is is it's understandable and and given your foresight with a new building and getting ready rid of the lease, I I really don't have a problem with that. It's it's the fiscally responsible thing to do um in my opinion. So, I appreciate that.
Yeah. It's one of those things we can say like when the lease ends, even if they stay there, this money can be used to to help do some of the work that's going to be done. If they move, it can be used day.
When the lease ends, the town's going to have a large capital outlay. And doing this allows us to start to spread that out so it's not just one massive,
right,
one-year hit in the future. And this is what a lot of municipalities do to balance the budgets and plan ahead as we start to plan for these things because we know they're coming. So this is to me it's an interesting and great step for the town to do. It's one of probably few times we've done something like this really like thinking ahead
right
and budgetary planning for a big outlay.
Well, I think that you can look at some of the projects that we've embarked upon, a couple of them we've finished. um what that has done to our debt service by in my opinion um lack of foresight and planning and putting money in reserves which is the reason the money the reserves are are are put in there so that the capital outlay is not so significant um a hit on the taxpayers. [clears throat] So
correct. Yeah.
Yeah. That's the goal. So thank you for working with us.
Thank you so much and everything you guys do. No, thank you uh to the board for all your support on this. This is a really exciting project I think for for everybody and and um we appreciate the support.
Yep.
Um Oh, sorry. Somebody have a question?
No, I said you're welcome after you said thank you. [laughter]
Thank you.
Okay, should we let's flip over to revenue. Um our revenue for printing remains really strong. Um you may remember that the library only received $800 from uh the years of 2020 through 2022 through our printing. Part of that's uh uh uh attributed to the shutdowns uh during COVID, but also we didn't control our own cash box. So Xerox would take the money away from the printers and then write us a check. Now that arrangement worked apparently fine before co I won't go into much organizational archaeology for that, but um when I kept pressing them in 2022 when I first got here, they said, "Oh, fine. We'll give you some money." And they gave us an $800 check. um our printing revenue is more like $12,000 a year. Um and uh so we switched vendors and now we collect our own cash. Um so that's been um very positive. Um and so we've been able to help uh recoup those costs through the past I think we switched to Toshiba in my first year in 2022. So we've been able to swi you know recoup those those earnings really um uh since then. So that's been really positive. That's awful.
Yeah, [laughter] it was. But
that's awful.
Well, it's good they fixed it, though.
It's good you fixed it, but that is just awful.
Yeah. And that's one way to put it. Well, we switch Jennifer's official position on the record.
My official position on the record. That is terrible business. That is not for like it's Xerox. They're like, we're the hometown business. That's not very nice. I'm going on the record saying Xerox is not very nice.
Oh boy. [laughter]
Not permanently on the record. I mean, I'll just state as a Xerox as a child of a lifetime Xerox employee, I wish I had Xerox printers in our library. Um, but I can't justify.
Yes, I worked with your mother.
Yeah, I know you did. [laughter]
I did.
Um, so, um, library card replacement fees. Um, we're seeing an increase from your vendor. That's just what we're budgeting for. um uh excuse me, we're seeing increase from the vendor, but that money essentially is money in money out. It goes back to the county library system who does the bargaining for those uh library cards. Um billings for replacement of lost books or BFRs. Um we expect a small increase there. Um these are for anytime somebody's lost or damaged um you know, taxpayer uh property. Um interesting earnings are up. Uh Paul and I have been conservative on this. Um, but as our fund balance grows, so does our uh earnings and interest.
Should we have already unclassified revenue, this is a dollar for coffee here, a stick of gum there kind of thing. Um, that's what you see there. It's minor. And then state aid, this is our guaranteed state aid every year based on the formula uh provided by the education department. Um, so we get 14,321. It's a per capita formula. Um, however, I think every year since I've started, we've been able to secure an additional 35,000 a year, which has been going to fund some of these projects like the LED. Um, we the potential phone project. Um, and that's thanks to uh Assemblyman Malo and State Senator Brook. Um, we've been very fortunate um to have both of them as our representatives. Um, so we've been we've been doing well there. So I think our our revenue ends up being up even though it's relatively minor in comparison to other departments about 28% this year primarily due to interest. So I can't take credit for it. [laughter] So uh overall uh the transfer from the fund would be just uh over 3 million minus the um 98,000. So uh it does end up being an 8.8% increase overall. But
again, if the board um did not move forward with that capital investment, it would be a 3.3% increase.
Mhm.
And I'm happy to answer any questions.
I don't have any
I don't have any questions.
Thank you for your presentation.
Yeah. Thanks, Adam.
Thank you everybody.
Yeah. Thanks.
All right. Last but not least, uh we have Superintendent of Highways Pat Stevens. He's got a lot of lines. So, oh boy. [clears throat]
I assume he's going to just hit the highlights. I agree.
Try my best to hit the highlights. Yeah, this is uh I don't know if I'm going to be able to make up time or not. So, we'll see. Um yeah, it's interesting watching the other budgets. Kind of jealous of certain stuff. Uh so, you're you're about to see uh a budget that consists of four different funds, not one single fund. um which means a few different things get seen different ways. So if we get right into it and start on uh the a uh a section um you start to see cost for employees and salaries. So I'll just explain roughly how that works. Obviously mine is in there. There's a potential for a step uh increase there. But then once we get into our couple of white collar employees and our blue collar employees, the way we do this because it's across four funds is we take the total number of employees that we have, calculate that amount, and then we look year-over-year where they spend their time and then it gets divided into those sections. So usually we use a three-year average to track how much
time they're spending on which service. So when you see general repairs, leaves, um you know, drainage work, stuff like that, we're we're literally tracking where we're spending the time and then making minor adjustments uh based on that. Uh in this first section, there's just a couple of things that adjusted. Uh one of them is actually a shift. So the third line there, compensation for part-time employees. We were carrying the part-time employees seasonally within the work of the season. So in the winter we'd take the part-time employees and put them in the snow labor fund and in the summer we'd put them in the general road repairs and in the fall sometimes we would put them in in the leaf. But we have this line so we kind of decided either use the line for the temporary seasonal employees or don't. So because we've shifted to deciding to use it, it is um increased uh by what represents about 3/4 of the increase of this entire section is just in that one line item. So now the part-time employees are in the part-time employee line instead of the other labor lines uh dis dispersed across the thing. Um as we go down through overtime uh overtime is up. So overtime in this section uh primarily by the admin staff. This is really to our capital projects. So, we've kind of learned this over the last 2 or 3 years that as we do capital
projects, but whether it's setting up offices, uh getting supplies, organizing things, as we go into these different buildings, there's additional uh time needed to be spent. And essentially, these people have full-time jobs now. So, when we're in the middle of a capital project, it has to go somewhere. So, we've seen an uptick. So, we're going to budget for that to make sure we have it covered uh for this year coming. And then hopefully after that when we're out of you know capital projects transitioning to the new building and such uh it can go back down to a lower level. Um yeah general improvements on the building. Uh again there's a few things that we end up performing ourselves on the capital projects when we enter the new new building. So the labor line up there general improvements labor. Uh we we've bumped that up a little bit so that we have time to do as much of the stuff inhouse that we can. We save quite a lot of money uh when we have the contractors do it. there's a pretty significant premium associated with that for public work right now. Um so that's why that line is up. Um computer and licensing, you know, sort of directed by it that those things go up year-over-year pretty flat in the middle section there through office equipment, building capital improvements, uh ref use. Uh we expect a small uptick just in year-over-year. You know, a lot of these services that we use internally, they run on fuel too. You'll see our lines
for fuel and consumption of materials um have had to adjust a lot over the past few years just because of you know the operating cost for anything associated with them. So it's kind of tricky but uh payroll time uh attendance system gasoline pumps we're keeping those flat down through the section. Cleaning we've got a pretty good handle on in the new building. We know what that's going to be. We don't anticipate an increase. Uh general improvements the same. Uh so pretty much everything down the rest of the way is pretty much the same. We noticed a small deviation in the electric bill, so we're going to bump that up a little bit. Uh street and road lighting. Uh a couple of increases there. So our road striping is done by the Monroe County uh striping. We have a we sign a contract with them every year. I think the materials literally the paint and the labor that they're paying for also go up every single year. We're trying to stay ahead of it. Um we don't like to come into that being five or $6,000 behind and it's increased by nearly that much each year. So, we put a little bit more in there. Uh, same thing with the lighting. Uh, the that's for the signal lighting maintenance. Uh, we really only have one that we maintain at the intersection of Harden and Publishers. Um, they come out several times a year, make sure the timing and everything is functioning properly with that, which is really important given how close it is to the school. So, that's ticked up. U, but we also contract with Monroe County
for that uh item. Um, off-road drainage labor. So, there's a small portion of the drainage labor uh connected in this one. Again, uh those labor lines get derived the same way I said that, you know, we're using a three-year average to track where this is going. This particular one, uh we've seen some underutilization. So, we brought that labor line down. And the next two, um we either kept flat or decreased slightly based on that 3-year average. So, that's a now on to the townwide fund. Um so, again, the overtime that you see there, um you're going to see the overtime high throughout all of these lines. Um a lot of that is because of being slightly well being understaffed. So as we are not able to meet the entire number that we have budgeted for in the staffing um at least a fair portion of the same amount of work has to get done which requires more overtime. So you're going to see that up there. Um compensation for employees actually ticks down. That has partially to do with what I said earlier about shifting the part-time employees out of some of these general sections into the part-time section. allows that to adjust down. And then the the other portion that brings it down a little is just the three-year average. We we saw a small down tick in this one, so we wanted to rightize it. Uh you see a major change there in the chips uh for equipment
line. So what that means is last year we uh use some of the chips funding that we get from the state uh to purchase equipment uh $145,000 for a piece of equipment. This coming year we're not planning on doing that. We're going to uh utilize the CHIPS money on roadway projects uh more more aggressively. So we won't we're not currently proposing to purchase any equipment with chips. Uh this line correlates directly with a revenue line. So that's the other thing about some of these lines when we get into the expenses especially um work for other departments and other communities like Monroe County. Uh even for snow and ice and the road work that we do there's going to be a a expense line which we try to be very conservative with and almost all of them are related to a revenue line. Um they don't match exactly because we want to be conservative. We want to be able to do a little bit more work, but we don't want to overcast the revenue and end up, you know, upside down even if we meet our goals. Um, so you'll kind of see that throughout this chips line is one of them that actually matches directly. So you'll see a revenue line that was at 145 last year and now it's going to be zero this year. Um, the other big one in this section is obviously the purchase uh equipment purchases. Um, that is only up about 30,000 uh year-over-year. Um this line is significantly bigger than it has been you know in decades past. Uh
we are trying to implement um a long-term strategy that drives the cost of this equipment down. So when we get to the revenue line for resale of equipment you'll see that it's incredibly small right now. So we are currently selling vehicles that are between 18 and 22 years old and the resale value is very very low. Um the other thing with vehicles that old is the maintenance cost is very very high. So, we're trying to get into a place where our average uh age, especially of our bigger equipment, is closer to 15 years than 20. Once we do that, those vehicles could be, you know, worth upwards of $100,000. So, if you take uh a big portion of that is two fulls size dump trucks, those are running about $350,000 a piece now. And the ones we're selling, we're lucky to get 20,000 for. if we're able to turn them over faster when they're a higher value, you can have that say same top value 350 to purchase it, but it could be worth 125 in the resale. So, it takes down the net value, the cost of that truck over the 15 years versus the 20 pretty significantly. Um, so we're working toward that. That's why this line is as big as it is to try to get that age down. Uh, we've already been able to reduce that uh line a little bit farther down, equipment repair and maintenance. A couple years ago that was $475,000.
So just in the progress we've made so far, we've been able to reduce that give or take $100,000 over the past few years. So that's the trend we should continue to see overall maintenance cost going down and then once we start to generate revenue from the resale of newer vehicles, um the delta between the equipment expense line and the equipment resale revenue line should narrow uh which is going to help things overall um through this the whole budget. uh uniform rental went up a little bit. Uh we've had quite a lot of turnover. Uh sometimes things get lost with that. So that seems to be bumping up a little bit, fluctuating as we do more hiring and and rotating through people. The revenue for this section, for the townwide section, [clears throat] uh rental equipment, snow and ice, 160. Uh we've seen a slight uptick in snow and ice with the winters that we've been having. Um and we do get compensated from both these entities, Monroe County and New York State, based on the use. Uh, Monroe County is a three-year average. They take our we track everybody's time, all the miles on the vehicle, all the salt used, everything associated with the program every year, submit that in a very structured format, and they use a three-year average of that information that's submitted to determine how much they compensate us for. Um, obviously, right now, the three-year average is actually tipping down. Um, but, uh, the
overall quantity that we're doing should trend up slightly. and and New York State actually does a direct comparison. They budget for a certain amount, but they pay us for the exact amount that we do and use on uh the state roads, which is primarily ridge and 250. Uh for us, we do not do 104, just to be clear. Um [clears throat] and then uh for this coming year, uh we're we're seeing a trend of the drainage related issues uh continuing to uptick and take longer than we'd prefer. So, we're actually going to shift some of our efforts throughout the year to that. So, for that reason, we've decreased uh lines like the rental equipment for other governments, Monroe County, from 100,000 down to 75,000, which should reflect uh more time for us to spend on different work um and often times work that's more centric within town. Uh sometimes in general, we meet and exceed these revenue numbers pretty heavily. Um but in order to do that, uh we're helping out Monroe County with jobs that are outside of Webster on County Roads. So, we're going to try to reduce that aspect uh slightly. Uh we don't want to get too aggressive with that because um there is a good relationship there back and forth, but we're kind of depending on each other for it, but we are going to make that adjustment.
I appreciate you making that adjustment. Um the drainage list was getting a little long of residents with drainage issues and and it's great to have the revenue from doing other county work, but it's important to take care of our residents
first. Absolutely.
So there's a balance.
Absolutely. Yeah, definitely a balance, especially when you're running all these numbers. So that's the strategy right now. Uh you see that chips line there? That's the one I said correlates directly to the expense line above. Uh we had the revenue that much last year, zero this year. So it lines up. Um then there's the transfer there. I don't know if you want to talk about that.
Yeah, we actually um since the most of the labor takes place in the highway part town fund and they utilize the equipment to do projects, the equipment is owned by the highway townwide fund. So there's actually a transfer from the part town to the townwide fund to compensate for the equipment usage. 550,000. It's actually 50,000 comes from the drainage district and 500,000 from the highway part town. Yeah. And that helps a lot cuz there's a lot of revenue lines in the other fund uh that are related to the work that we do with the equipment and the labor, but that labor can't come over into this section. Uh so we have to do it via transfer in order to balance things out. And there's not as much use in the other side, so it kind of skews things. So, um, Paul had, uh, developed this this strategy to be able to rightsize that a little bit a few years ago, and it really does help tremendously with a lot of the strategies I I mentioned earlier. Uh, and then, uh, yeah, so there's the totals there, but then we're right into
benefits are just consistent with my previous comments.
So, on to Parktown.
Yep. And the totals there recap. Obviously, pretty flat year-over-year.
Pretty flat. But that doesn't again it's flat but it doesn't include the blue collar contract.
It doesn't include the cola. So I take the u I assess the 36 or so employees that we have um and try to anticipate merit increases. You know the current have we look at uh represents about a 5% increase across the board through just which folks get merit which ones don't. Uh and that's based on an estimate by me. I try to be conservative by that. If I think somebody's on the right track we put that in the budget. It doesn't mean they automatically get it. They still have to earn it. Um and and we hope they do, but at the same time, we just want to make sure there's funds there to do it. So, yeah, it does not include a cola, but it includes just merit-based increases on those uh labor lines that we're looking at. Part town D. So, we're on to our third. We're getting getting closer. So, overtime again up um in relation to the little bit of the underst staffing, a little bit of the the time constraints that we're under as we go through things. compensations for employees up slightly in this section based on those uh merit-based projections. Uh holiday and sick
slightly down. That would be based on a three-year average. So, if you're seeing something like that, it means we've seen over the past little time that uh we haven't been using all the budget. So, we're going to adjust where we can. Fuel. Um I believe this is conservative. I really hope it is conservative, but there's so much fluctuation with that right now. on such a large volume item for us with the the fleet that we have that we're projecting a pretty good increase in that just to make sure we don't have to worry about buying fuel. Um and then general road repair materials. Um so if you look at overall everything we're doing across the board with this stuff um and we see you know an increase over the year you know less than 10% across the board for you know all of these funds we're talking about. um things like general repair materials, the materials we use, the asphalt, the stone, which you know requires heavy fuel using equipment to do have gone up 20 or 30% in the last few years. So the reflection of something like a 5 or 10% increase in this in a lot of ways represents adjustments of up to 10 or 15% to bring it back down just to get it there because of how much some of the materials we have to purchase to do our work have gone up. Um you know so it just just to be clear about that it it's
tricky because the the numbers are large but um there is a lot of thought and a lot of adjustment. You know we're always the goal on on efficiency but sometimes we do have to change the quantities of what we're doing to make these things meet as much as we do um and and without eliminating or reducing service is is really the big big challenge when you're looking at these numbers. um permanent road improvements. These are capital improvements like we're doing on Pellet and later this year, Hard Road. Um next year, I think there'll still be some portions of those going on as well as some other neighborhoods that'll get picked up back up for the full reconstruction of the gutters and the pavement. Um we're currently trying to utilize a lot of CHIPS funding for this uh which is the funding that comes from the state. Um these are much longer repairs. When we do a full reconstruction like this, we expect not to do a lot of anything other than basic maintenance for 20 to 30 years. Um, so it it makes good sense to use the state funding that sometimes has restrictions on how often you can do a treatment on a road for these capital projects. So, we made that shift a little bit last year. We're going to bump it up a little bit this year just to track with all the expensive materials. Uh, wages for animal control. We found we weren't using this line. Um, we have a couple other lines with general roads and agreements with the county that we
were tracking some of those efforts to. So, we we got rid of that. um leaf pickup. Um we've actually got the overtime apparently projected pretty close. Uh but we did notice overall the season's getting a little bit longer with the milder milder falls. We're having a little bit of a labor increase on that. So we're going to bump that up so that um we can continue that service to the residents. Very heavily utilized service that we want to make sure is manned properly. Uh snow and ice or snow removal. So these are the expense lines associated with a lot of the revenues. the lines that you see um very big section of what we do. Um make sure if you're analyzing what this costs the taxpayer to generate those revenues because the revenues from the county and state are pretty significant and they would directly uh offset these sections here. Uh and these are mostly projected to match the labor outputs that we have. And then uh little adjustments for the three-year averages along with some compensation for the fuel. Um salt continues to go up every year. Um hopefully uh this winter with the completion of the the capital project we're currently under with the salt barn, we won't have uh any capacity concerns. We should have a much better um storage facility that'll hold more and last for a long time. So that's really going to help with the day-to-day
on the salt. I don't know if it'll help the cost go down. Probably not. We're expecting it to increase a little bit. um services for other governments, uh brush weeds, county roads. Uh so these we left the labor up. So again, this is an area where we're being conservative, right? So the revenue lines are quite a lot lower when we get to them. [laughter] We've kind of kept this in a similar place just to make sure if something comes up, we're we're able to do it. Again, uh we should overperform, which means underutilize that that number hopefully. Then we get into benefits again.
No, no different comments on employee benefits. They're consistent with the the other funds we've looked at.
So here's the revenue.
Yeah. Revenue lines. Obviously, we got the sales tax that you talked about earlier.
Yeah. They get an allocation of the sales tax money we get from Monroe County.
And then we have, you know, the services for other governments. So this is the labor side. I talked about how there was the equipment uh compensation that we get usually get annually. This is the labor side of it. Uh you see the labor line for Monroe County, we've reduced down. That reflects the focus to transition to the drainage type work. Um snow and ice is based on the averages that we've seen an uptick on snow and ice, especially with last winter. There was a lot of effort put into that. So we're expecting those numbers to possibly trend up again this year. We we try to hit a happy medium with that uh the best we can. um other lines through there. Unclassified revenue we found we weren't seeing uh chips aid the revenue lines match the expense lines from above.
And there's the other side of the transfer we talked about a few minutes ago.
Yep. So you notice that transfer that was in that account was 550. 500 of it comes from this account and another small portion comes from the drainage fund which is our last fund to discuss which is exciting. Um so this is our consolidated uh drainage district um which has existed for a long time. The nice thing about this particular fund is it does acrew a balance. Uh heard a couple other groups talk about you know acrewing a capital balance long-term planning with the Parktown townwide those other funds. Um any improvements any additional revenue any underutilization goes into the general funds. It doesn't stick directly with highway ccentric uh items. this drainage fund does uh and it's starting to accumulate a balance which is great that will allow us to start to plan larger capital projects related to drainage which we have not been able to do in the past. Um the biggest challenge with this is applying the manpower to it. So the past few years it's been pretty heavily underutilized for drainage labor. So we are reducing those amounts a little bit but we hope to actually spend a bit more time on this. Obviously, if we're spending more time on this, hopefully less, a little bit, working out of town is the is the goal currently. So, a few of these numbers have tracked up to try
to uh encourage that. I I bumped the engineering up pretty significantly on this one cuz I'd like to do more planning. A lot of the drainage stuff we do either requires studies or needs to be looked at for watershed analysis, things of that nature. I'd like to do a bit more of that to get some of this stuff tracked and planned out. So, uh we increase that number quite a lot. employee benefits.
Same thing, no comment.
And then the revenues in this section, uh, we get a section from new developments that get camered. Um, then there's an interest in earning line that Paul um, deals with. Uh, then it kind of talks a little bit about the overall expense and how that deres a rate. So, this um, we were able to get a consolidated drainage district that covers the entire town a few years ago. uh we went through and did a calculation and right sized uh a rate against all of our users which it said at the top is a little over 20,000 uh parcels um this particular year because we want to make sure to you know be on track of what we're doing. The rate actually has gone down uh slightly for the drainage work we performed. that shows up as a fee on the uh on your tax bill uh per residents. And it's there's a calculation to it for commercial property based on their square footage of impervious surface uh with what they pay into the overall town drainage, which is um really, if you think about it, it's to make sure the stuff you use doesn't flood. Not specifically your yard, but the roads, um you know, facilities within town, things of that nature. It's to keep the overall flow going more so than a specific thing at your house. Um, so that's the best way I can explain that.
And then the grand totals, um, tracking up slightly across the hall of those lines,
you know, to the the tune of what you see there, the big budget.
Yeah, we're actually appropriating a fairly substantial amount of money. Uh, the highway part town fund has a sizable fund balance uh to keep us under the tax cap, contributes toward it. um
not only to not only to keep us under the tax cap but to utilize the funds so we're not so
so we're between the 15 and 50% as well.
Correct. The sales tax uh yeah so the this highway part town fund we actually reduced the tax rate to zero which allows us to use sales tax money in the general townwide fund uh which actually is helping pay for some of the debt service on the highway building. So, we're going to do that as long as we can. Uh, at some point it'll have to flip back, but um, it's been a pretty good strategy so far.
Good. Okay. Well, I appreciate it, Pat.
Thanks, Pat.
Thank you.
All right. That [clears throat] concludes the preliminary budget workshops for 2026. We have a regularly scheduled town board meeting in