Notes provided by: Colleen Kirby

Summary from the Feb 7th Joint School Committee/Board of Selectmen Meeting
Whittemore Robbins house.

Note that I am not trying to get verbatim what people have said but just my understanding of the issues discussed. I had hoped that perhaps the two boards would be able to come together with some sort of joint plan to present to Town Meeting on how to get through our ongoing fiscal crisis. I am sure there were several board members who wanted this as well, but it was perhaps too lofty of a goal for a 2 hour meeting.

Attendees: Diane Mahon, Charlie Lyons, Kevin Greeley, Jack Hurd, Kathleen Dias, Suzanne Owayda, Paul Schlichtman, Jeff Thielman, Barbara Goodman, Joani LaMachia, Sue Sheffler, Marie Krepelka, Kay Donovan, Rob Adelson? school CFO (plus Berto Scalese of the Advocate and two interested community members-Annie LaCourt and yours truly)

On the way home from the joint School Committee/Board of Selectmen meeting I tuned into a Broadway hits show and they were playing the song about River City:

There's Trouble here in Arlington,
Trouble, with a capital T
Which rhymes with B and that means Budget.

I am so glad that the two boards were able to come together and share their thoughts and observations. They did come up with a few statements they could agree on--don't hold me to this exact wording: 1. We must pressure the state to increase local aid and fully fund the School Building Assistance Program. 2. We must support Senator Havern's Cherry Sheet resolution. (so that hard figures for local aid are released in March so we can do budgeting based on real numbers). 3. The town and schools have suffered serious cuts in fiscal year 2004.

Other topics discussed with no consensus:

1. If nothing changes we probably have a $3M deficit. If we can get structural changes like better terms on union contracts (a combination of raises and insurance that doesn't bankrupt the system) then we may not end up with that much of a deficit. This would take some real strong leadership in town and I'm not convinced our boards and Town Meeting are up for this one. Not that they aren't trying. And this is an ongoing multi-year effort which will likely not be solved in one year.
2. Historically it wasn't a problem to offset lower pay with good benefits but now that insurance costs have skyrocketed (much more than the 2.5% per year we are limited to) we can't keep up with these costs. Most of the members seemed to agree that we need to push for the town to not be responsible for such high benefit packages as paying for up to 90% of health care benefits. This is way above what is agreed to in nearly all other communities across the state. Plus it encourages spouses to join our plan rather than having incentives in place so people use their spouses' insurance. We need to make sure our bargaining entities keep that in mind during all negotiated contracts with town and school employees. Our costs cannot keep increasing higher than our revenue because then we have to cut services.
3. Can we raise fees or taxes? Fees have been raised in town (parking, water rates) and in the schools (music, kindergarten, sports). There are problems with collecting fees in terms of finding the person-hours to do it and in terms of equity with who bears the burden of the fees. It has been raised that the taxpayers of Arlington cannot pay more in taxes. It has been raised that it would not be fair to make people pay a fee on trash as that would impact 100% of the town, many of whom may only notice that trash is the one service they receive. On the other hand it doesn't seem equitable that obvious service cuts have fallen on the schools, whose families are about 20% of the town. Why must they bear the majority of the cuts? There haven't been any noticeable decrease in trash services. We need to study the trash issue to change people's behavior so trash doesn't cost the town so much and so we aren't impacting the environment as much. This committee will take longer than this year to come up with a reasonable solution.
4. The School Building Assistance Program seems to be promising to pay out for Pierce and Dallin beginning in 2007 however no new monies have been transferred into the Program yet. It does seem that the state is pushing this so we can go ahead with the Dallin rebuild. There may be $200,000 coming in for Ottoson in FY06?
5. Last year the tax bill went up but was mainly for water fees. Maybe that needs to be shown directly on the tax bill so people see what it is they are paying for and that it's not local costs that have been increasing so much.
6. How can we take more services away from our town and especially from our children? Will that happen two years in a row? The state and federal governments have turned their backs on towns and cities. 47 states have major deficits now. They don't have to balance their budgets but we do. We lost a larger amount of aid in Arlington than many other towns in the state and we are suffering because of it. The state special education circuit breaker is not being funded so we have to pay for the lack of funds locally. There should be an increase in Federal Special Education funds next year based on what has been promised at the national level but no increase from ESEA/No Child Left Behind. Our state budget is also being eaten up by medical cost increases in the form of Medicare.

These are my notes, taken to best of my ability and are in no way official minutes or notes of any of the individuals sited in my report. If I got anything wrong please let me know and I'll fix them.

SPOT offers these notes as a service to the community.
SPOT is an organization of concerned parents and community members who are interested in full, equitable and sound financing of our public education.
We regret any errors and omissions.