Selectmen retreat coming up; some goals for the next one year to three years:
Ask Town Meeting to amend their vote and create ambulance revolving fund so the town can fully fund the service and follow MGL.
Create special stabilization fund for roads / infrastructure.
Clean up / get money from the many special town meeting articles straight. (Been there for 5 or 10 years, work to get off the books and into a good use.
More funding and a real plan to address town trees rather than letting the weather to do it for us.
Re-do or get out of intermunicipal agreements that do not benefit Templeton.
This will be a big step in getting the Town on track. This move has been needed for a very long time. Thank you for putting this forward.
ReplyDeleteAll good points Jeff.
ReplyDeleteNow on to the biggest issue. Employee costs. We have a School District with $12 million in employee expenses. If they go over a 2% overall increase between raises, healthcare, retirement, etc do you know what that does to Templeton $10 million dollar budget with prop 2 1/2?
12,000,000 x 2% = $240,000
10,000,000 x 2.5% = $250,000
So anything else wanted by the school or town comes out of your hide! That is unless that State kicks back more of your income dollars, but good luck as they go fishing for funds.
2022 is going to be a huge mess unless we plan for scaling back expenses now.
My point being is " Have a Plan" as you cannot tell us in the Spring that you didn't know and couldn't tell and will do better.
ReplyDeleteIf the Board doesn't get proactive have a real functioning plan what are they waiting for. You know the School comes in $600-$1 million additional per year, every year regardless were it comes from. This will kill both the small towns it serves unless reined in. Not asked, not requested, but led down to Town Meeting by a proactive BOS that tells the people we cannot afford to pay these type of increases.
If we dont get this under control soon you think your roads suck now.........lol. Since we paid for the road study based on their provided numbers we have sunk an additional $5 million into the infrastructure hole to like $21,000,000 behind "decent roads"