The finance subcommittee of the city council is comprised of five council members and considers any or all questions appropriate for the purpose of considering the budget.

Including the creation of new positions to the payroll, changes to the employee classification plan.

Or any matters pertaining to increasing the City of Framingham employee headcount.

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First order of business, we have public participation.

If you're here for something to publicly participate about that is not on the agenda, you're more than welcome to speak.

Yeah, Mr.

Bloom.

We're gonna start with Donna Kilcoin, author for you're up, Donna.

Hi, can you hear me?

Can you hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you.

Okay, great.

Um, my comment is actually kind of an add-on to the comments I made the other night about um the tax relief program and for this committee to kind of drill down and find out um how many of our taxpayers are currently on the margins.

Um and what the reach out will be for them towards um some of the tax relief programs that might be available to them.

Um I think that we need to be a little bit more proactive in that realm if we're going to keep um going up on the tax rate and um so I know I spoke about wanting to know what those numbers were, but I I think as a committee, um it's kind of your obligation to figure out where we are as far as our citizens and um how many of them are at risk during this uh increased taxes.

So thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Donna.

Next speaker, Mr.

Bloomfield.

Three minutes, sir.

Yes, can you hear me, Mr.

Chairman?

Loud and clear, Mr.

Bloomfield, yes.

Okay, look at a uh just kind of get on this uh just a little while ago, and I'm looking at the your agenda, and it's very uh very aggressive in terms of what you want to do and how you want to do it, but it's not gonna be easy.

So what we I'm not gonna be speaking about different uh projects, but simply uh uh an outlook.

If you can see five years out that things would be fairly consistent and balanced, then you could use linear regression analysis and be right on each year where things are heading.

You'd be able to go like a straight line.

Unfortunately, things uh kind of help the scout there.

So you're gonna have to kind of improvise, and that's gonna be a challenge for you folks given the time frame that you have.

You have to get the information collected and all the segments that I've mentioned and the categories that I've mentioned, and and pull them together.

So, for instance, you may want to look at all uh major building activities for all the buildings that we have in the city that are planned to be built that are currently under construction that need major renovation, all those major cost situations, and the category is city and school buildings.

Mr.

Bloomfield, but the word that's you're talking about the budget, and that's on the agenda.

So do you want do you have comments that uh calling you during the budget?

But this is we're we're here for the budget, so your comments should be coming when we're talking about the budget items.

I'm not talking about the budget items in the true sense.

All I'm saying is you need to get categories in a roundabout way, then.

Is that what we're doing?

Yeah, well, no, you have to get them in categories so you can make sure you've got them all.

Sometimes things fall through the cracks, and you need to make sure you got them all and you understand what year they're coming up over the next five years.

If you're just gonna look at a one-year situation, then you're you're not nearly gonna have the essence of where things are headed for the city and how we're gonna handle it and how much revenue we need each year to deal with the expenses made that are going to be created by all these projects that we want to do or committed to do.

If we don't have the revenue, we can't do them.

We'd like to know that we what we'd have to do for revenue to match our ambitious uh budget increases.

That's all.

That's all I'm saying.

Okay.

And I wish you're well with it.

Thank you very much.

Two and a half minutes.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yep.

There are no other hands up.

There's nobody else in the room for public participation.

First order of business.

Mr.