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Williamstown Police Chief Kyle Johnson and Town Manager Jason Hoch discuss the police budget in front of the Finance Committee on Wednesday evening.

Williamstown Fin Comm Combs Through FY18 Spending Plan

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Finance Committee last week dug into the details of the town's proposed fiscal 2018 operations budget, which calls for an aggregate 1.98 percent increase in costs across all non-school departments.
 
The Police Department, Milne Public Library, Council on Aging, Community Development Office, and Assessor and Finance departments were among those who presented their spending plans to the Fin Comm.
 
Town Manager Jason Hoch told the committee the town is projecting a 3 percent wage adjustment for its non-union employees in FY18. And the budget's bottom line benefits from a change in the Berkshire Health Group plan that shifts costs away from municipalities and onto public employees through deductibles.
 
"We did get, one could argue from a budgeting point of view, lucky when we were forced into a health-care change by Berkshire Health," Hoch told the Board of Selectmen last Wednesday. "The bad news is the coverage will make almost every one of our employees worse off. I'm disappointed in that, but this is beyond our control. We voted against this.
 
"From a budget point of view, it's great, but from a taking care of your people point of view, it's not ideal."
 
The bottom lines of most of the departments the Fin Comm looked at Wednesday night were relatively in line with the 2 percent hike throughout Town Hall, but there were a few changes within the departments the generated questions and discussions from the committee during the speedy 90-minute meeting.
 
An example is the Building Assessor's budget, which is up by nearly 14 percent from FY17 because of a software change necessitated by a change in Boston, Principal Assessor Bill Barkin told the Fin Comm.
 
"The Department of Revenue is abandoning the software we've been on for seven or eight years," Bill Barkin said. "That's left the towns high and dry, and we're scrambling to convert."
 
The software in question maintains all the pertinent data on every property in town, he said. Currently, Williamstown uses a program developed and owned by the commonwealth, but that system no longer will be an option.
 
"It has to do with the state's cutback," Barkin said. "They're cutting back in their IT, and they don't want to support it anymore."
 
The town instead is looking at software from one of the leading private firms in the industry that already has a strong foothold in New England, he said. The initial acquisition cost is being spread over a couple of years with $12,250 budgeted in FY18. Going forward, the licensing fee on the new software will be about 50 percent more than what the town currently pays the state for using similar technology, Barkin and Hoch told the committee.
 
The $12,250 hit on the FY18 budget in Barkin's department accounts for most of a $7,106 $17,106 total increase from FY17, raising the department's budget to $141,316, from $124,210 in the current fiscal year.
 
Technology is costing the town a little more in another area of the budget as well.
 
Town Hall's IT budget is up by a little more than 5 percent in FY18 as the town moves more of its operations onto the cloud. The move allows for smoother operations in the short term and cost savings in the long run, Finance Director Janet Sadler said.
 
"We continue to make strides forward in trying to go to the cloud, to become more efficient, to move ourselves further away from having to replace servers constantly," she said. "We are making a transition to Google Docs, Google email. It's more efficient in being able to access documents, share things with our coworkers, spam filtering.
 
"When Bill Barkin goes to his new program, that can go on the server because we now have room because our documents and emails have gone to the cloud. There's a big one-time expense for it, but we feel it's the right way to go."
 
The data processing line in the IT budget is up by 54 percent (from about $33,000 to about $52,500), and the budget features a new line item, $1,800, to pay for Google licensing fees.
 
That fee allows the town to use a more secure version of Google's email and document products than is available to consumers, Hoch told the Fin Comm.
 
In addition to some of the cost increases sprinkled throughout the budgets presented Wednesday, there also were minor cost savings here and there.
 
For example, both the public library and Harper Center are budgeting lower costs for utilities in 2018 because of efficiencies realized by physical upgrades. The Milne Library's recently replaced furnace means it needs to budget 1 percent less for natural gas in FY18, a savings of $1,462. The Council on Aging's Harper Center is budgeting 29 percent less for electricity and 14 percent less for natural gas (combined savings of $1,500) because of renovations made to the building in recent years, Council on Aging Director Brian O'Grady told the committee.
 
The Fin Comm was generally pleased with all of the presentations from staff that it heard on Wednesday night.
 
Committee members asked Hoch followup questions based on an appeal it heard last month from Village Ambulance Service. He told them there is no money currently in the town budget to support the service, and any expenditure that could potentially show up would be in the form of a separate warrant article for May's annual town meeting.
 
"There is no money proposal at this point," Hoch said. "A group of us representing the town, Village Ambulance, the Fire Department and [Williams College] are having a conversation. If it it gets to the point where there's money, if we reached something before town meeting that required money, it would most likely be a warrant article."
 
In other business Wednesday, the Fin Comm authorized Chairman Michael Sussman to approach the chairs of the Williamstown Elementary and Mount Greylock School committees about having an April meeting to discuss long-term budgeting issues.
 
"I'm talking about how over the next three to five years do the schools bring their budgets in line with what the town can support," Sussman said.
 
The Tri-District central office, which administers both WES and Mount Greylock (and Lanesborough Elementary School) currently is led by an interim superintendent and is in the process of hiring a new business manager.

Tags: fiscal 2018,   williamstown_budget,   

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Letter: Vote for Someone Other Than Trump

Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:

I urge my Republican friends to vote for someone other than Donald Trump in November. His rallies are getting embarrassingly sparse and his speeches more hostile and confused. He's looking desperately for money, now selling poor-quality gold sneakers for $399. While Trump's online fans embrace him more tightly, more and more of the people who actually worked with Trump have broken with him, often issuing statements denouncing his motives, intellect, and patriotism.

Mike Pence is the most recent, but the list now includes William Barr, former attorney general (who compared him to a 9-year-old); former NSC Chairs Bolton and McMaster; former Defense Secretaries Mattis and Esper; former Chiefs of Staff Kelly and Mulvaney; former Secretary of State Tillerson; former Homeland Security chief Bossert; and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who referred to Trump as a "wannabe dictator." This level of rejection by former colleagues is unprecedented in American politics.

Are these people just cozying up to the Establishment "Uniparty," as his fans would have it? No. Most of them are retired from politics. It's just that they see the danger most clearly. General Milley is right. Trump's most constant refrain is his desire to hurt his critics, including traditional conservatives. Although Liz Cheney lost her Wyoming seat in Congress, he now wants her jailed for investigating him.

This man should not be president of the USA.

Jim Mahon
Williamstown, Mass.

 

 

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