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Date: 3/28/2022
LUDLOW – While the Ludlow Board of Selectmen, Finance Committee and School Committee were set to meet to discuss challenges with the school department budget during a special meeting on March 23, the committees discussed issues with the current budget process.
Before diving into the overarching process problems with the budget, interim Superintendent Lisa Nemeth discussed the challenges moving into Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23) for the school department, beginning with the fact that the schools were facing a $1 million cut from their proposed budget because of a 1 percent increase for the budget. Initially the department was not going to see an increase in percentage at all, which would have resulted in cuts to teaching.
“Knowing the other departments got all different percentages, it is not equivalent to what some other departments are getting. It is only a $200,000 increase to our budget and last year it was almost a $900,000 increase,” she said.
Despite a smaller than expected budget, Nemeth said the district was ready to work at that number but was hoping for change in future budget discussions.
“My understanding was this meeting was to fix the process and I hope going forward the department heads can sit down like we do at the School Department. I would have liked this year to have sat down with the police chief, the fire chief and whoever to talk about how much money we have as a town and where are all the pieces of the pie are going,” she said. “I am not here to say the School Department needs everything, we just want to have a fair play in it, and it just didn’t seem fair this year.”
Finance Committee Chair Maureen “Kim” Downing joined the discussion to express her frustration with changes to the budget process for FY23.
“These numbers were not plugged in, discussed, researched or backgrounded by anyone except Town Hall level, that is totally different than prior years,” she said.
Board member Manuel Silva said the town followed the same budget it has been for years.
“I have been on the Budget Subcommittee for four years. We have done this process, we have sat here, we have discussed where we can go with this, our numbers are our numbers and we cannot go over the levy limit. The selectmen met with the Fire Department and the Police Department, and they both requested to come in, they proposed their needs and we gave them a little bit this year, so those numbers were put into this budget,” he said.
Downing said her committee should be working with department heads on the budget.
“Nobody makes the budget, the budget is made by wants and needs of the community, it is overseen by the department heads and for me, the Finance Committee partners with the department heads to fit their wants and needs into the entire town’s available budgets and what we can afford as an entire town. That never happened,” she said.
Following those meetings, Downing said the committee typically continued on by working with the town accountant and Board of Selectmen.
“Prior to that, the final numbers were not plugged in, the finance committee worked with each department head and went line item by line item, and we plugged in a Level 2 budget. Then we went through with the town accountant to see if it would work within our levy limit, all those numbers were totaled up and the Level 3 were final voted numbers that came to the Board of Selectmen for a final recommendation,” she said.
Downing said one of her biggest frustrations was not going over each line item in the budget with each department.
“We don’t care if you change the process but let us know, the problem comes when you get departments that haven’t sat line by line, which is where you can glean a lot of money when you sit and work with every department, they are willing to give up things and you find things, it’s two and a half months of work meeting every single week, but you can find a half a million to three quarters of a million dollars,” she said.
Town Accountant Kim Collins said she was in contact with all the department heads throughout the FY23 budget process.
“Way back in September or October, I sent out emails to all the departments, they get a spreadsheet to put in their salaries, what their contract negotiations resulted in and a 1 percent raise put in because our insurance is changing July 1. I get emails from every single department, and we talk about their budgets all throughout the year trying to figure out what they need,” she said.
Following the initial requests, Collins said the Level 2 budget was reviewed by her and former Town Administrator Ellie Villano before it was voted on by the Budget Subcommittee and sent to the Board of Selectmen, before it is finally sent to the Finance Committee for their recommendations.
Collins also highlighted the increasing costs for budgeting due to outside factors.
“Over the past few years our budget has increased substantially due to debt for the Senior Center and the school, it is increasing because we have to insure vacant and empty buildings, they are twice as expensive, it is increasing because health insurance and retirement is going up,” she said. “There are so many costs we cannot control that we absolutely have to put in the budget before we can give anything to anybody else.”
Collins added that she was concerned about the current state of the budget.
“The concern I have here is that we are stuck in a budget process, we are on Level 2 which needs to be reviewed by Finance Committee and that has not happened,” she said.
Board member James Gennette said it was not the Finance Committee or the Board of Selectmen members’ job to work line by line on the budget.
“We are elected officials and we are in oversight; we pay good people like Mrs. Collins to do her job and then they submit that to us for review to move on, we don’t get into the day to day, that’s why you’re getting a Level 2 budget. They come to us after they have done all their work and we send it along to finance,” he said.
At that point, Board Vice Chair Antonio Goncalves, who was acting as the chair for the meeting, cut the discussion to refocus on the discussion of the school budget.
Going forward, the committees agreed to discuss changes to the budget process beginning with the FY24 budget, since it was too late for the FY23 budget with Annual Town Meeting just over a month away.