All right.

Good evening, uh ladies and gentlemen.

And welcome to our first budget hearing for the fiscal year 2027 budget.

Um, like all city uh council meetings that this meeting is being live streamed and recorded.

City council and committee meetings can be viewed on the City of New Bedford's homepage under quick links, then meetings.

All right.

So at this time, I am going to uh have our CFO come up, Bob Ekstrom, give a little presentation and overview um of our budget.

But uh before that, I just wanted to uh to my colleagues, my new colleagues and uh those uh older colleagues uh uh counselors, uh that uh the finance team does a great job at um uh getting turnarounds to our questions asked here in these meetings.

So uh I thank them.

Uh we all thank them for their speedy work, uh working with our department heads.

Uh Superintendent O'Leary is here, and uh very uh happy to uh work with all of them and get those turnarounds quick on uh question answers to our questions.

So I thank them for for that, Sharon and Bob.

Thank you guys.

Uh so I'll call up Bob at this time.

Good evening, counselors, and welcome to 2027.

I guess I'll be the first one to uh to wish you a good new year here, about six months earlier from the real thing.

It's the nature of this job though.

You uh we just get finished with fiscal twenty-five and we're starting fiscal twenty-seven's budget.

I'm really in twenty-six, and sometimes I forget that.

But uh as you can gather, this is uh this has been a bit of a challenging spring.

Uh you've uh you've heard some of the uh you've heard the mayor speak uh about a starting balance, which is probably the greatest gap that I've seen in my twelve to fourteen years here.

Uh we started off with about thirty-two point thirty-two and a half million dollars.

Starting gap of thirty-two million four hundred and ninety-two thousand.

The mayor had alluded to this uh in his uh presentation last week.

Uh the highest I've ever seen before is about twelve million dollars.

However, I think that was back in the Ari days, and he may have not counted some of the requisition, uh some of the requests that departments submit for enhancements such as for new programs, uh new initiatives.

And I did include that because it's all it's all on the table for us to consider.

So obviously uh we're not state state law requires us to produce a uh balanced budget to you.

So to get from 32 million four ninety-two down to a balanced budget took a little bit of work this year, as you can gather.

So first of all, uh we uh we had to pretty much decline any requests from of a from our department heads for anything new this year other than their existing baseline budgets.

I'll tell you briefly what baseline means.

Okay, baseline means all your existing personnel, but they get any kind of cola increases or uh step increases that they were deserving under the unit C provisions or under their own collective bargaining agreements.

It also includes any kind of contractual increases, same services, higher prices.

Solid waste is a good example.

Uh, capital waste services had as had increased prices in years two and in year three.

That is a baseline cost.

That increase uh from year two to year three is baseline.

Other than that, we had to eliminate, as you can as you can see, seven seven and a half million dollars.

That's a lot of no's to have to tell our department heads who worked quite tirelessly themselves in trying to put together these plans.

Now part of that is uh part of that no is is no not right now.

And for some time now, for the three years, we've been pushing all of the capital requests off to the CIP program.

Uh we we've took funding of capital improvements out of the budget when I first came back as CFO.

The only exceptions that you see in your in your budgets now are for small reserves for like, for instance, for IT.

They don't know when machinery is going to break, they have to put a new server in, something goes wrong, something like that.

So we had uh DPI, fire, police, D FFM, IT have small reserves for capital.

And we're also getting rid of the last of the old lease purchase arrangements that uh that we used to use quite frequently for our for uh for purchasing vehicles.

It's a tool that I do not like very much.

Uh it comes with a very high implicit interest rate.

So what we did was we pushed all the vehicle purchases over to the CIP now.

So bonding it in the CIP is in the range of, depending on how long we go out, it's in the range of about 4 percent, which is about half as much as we were looking to pay in lease purchases.

So after all those no's, we had uh some back and forth with the school department.

We've made an adjustment to the school budget once again this year, 4.5, almost $4.6 million.

And I'll explain that a little bit more later.

Uh but basically it comes down to um two line items.

One is under the net school spending formula for Chapter 70, and the second one is for other net school spending expenditures uh that are not eligible under the net school spending formula.

Finally, you're gonna see later on, I'm gonna show you the individual actions that we took, but uh the city administration, department heads, we all got together, we met several times.

In fact, seven councils were involved in some of our meetings where we presented uh some of our findings to date, and we eliminated seven point seven million dollars from existing baseline budgets on top of all the other cuts that saying no to to uh to the uh the any enhancement requests and the four point six million dollars to school.

We said no to seven point seven in city costs as well.

Uh so this final uh number gets us down to a to uh to a levy that uh um I apologize, that second arrowed bullet, that 12 million seven hundred twenty-eight is actually net.

The actual tax increase was higher than that, but we eliminated some of our so-called one-time funding.

Last year we used we had to use some free cash uh as a source of revenue to to balance the budget.

That's been taken out.

So the net effect of the tax increase this year, less the uh the reduction of the one-time money is the final difference of $12.7 million.

Uh it's no secret that we've we're in the midst of uh basically a structural uh deficit right now.

We have revenues that are growing far smaller than expenditures are, and it's been that way for some time.

Uh it's it's kind of coming home to roost more and more now.

You'll see later on in this presentation that we have had to rely on a lot of one-time sources of of revenue to keep the budget balanced over the last three or four years.

Uh this gap right now uh is very, very premature since we're talking about 2027, but as it stands right now, if the budget is passed the way it is, we will have another problem next year and the year after.

Right now, very rough estimates on my part call for a 10 million dollar gap in 2028 and a uh 28 million dollar gap in uh in I'm sorry, an $18 million gap in 2029.

Uh that compares to the $32 million, though.

So we're sort of better off.

The optimist in me will say we uh we have some time to fix that problem, and it's not as big as the one we started with this year.

So I like to begin uh 2027 by taking a quick uh recap of where we left 2026 off.

So I break this down only just to keep things sort of simple.

I break it down into school and city.

Uh you can see we were we uh had an adopted budget of 492 million dollars last year.

We asked for four, we uh proposed 498 million, but council cuts were uh as you can see down below 7 million 948 with the council cuts.

So that brought us to the actual adopted budget of 492 million.

However, we went back and had to restate that that budget for uh 5.7 million dollars in supplemental budget requests.

This happened, I think, at three different points in the year.

Most of that was with school, and the biggest reason there is because we made the adjustments to the school department last year, waiting to see what the net school spending formula would work out to be.

As you know, as you recall, uh Governor Healy uh had imposed a cut to, I think it was the charter school uh tuition reimbursements.

And that that cut was vetoed, I think it came about sometime around December or January, and we came back to you with the third wave of uh of supplemental requests to reinstall that in that particular case was $1.4 million.

So all in all, we put $5 million back into the school department through the supplemental budget process and another $745,000 in city.

I can tell you that's the $495,000 for the Zriterion and $250,000 for the parallel products litigation.

Those are those two enhanced the supplements.

Additionally, we funded uh the 2026 budget with $4.5 million of free cash and stabilization transfers.

Now these are what we call, these are what we refer to with the one-time spending.

That's we're taking out of fund balance and using it to cover our 2026 budget.

The reason is that that was a gap that never got filled.

It's almost like taking out of your IRA account to pay for some of your personal expenses, uh, ongoing personal expenses.

Something I don't like to do.

Um it's not prudent to do it, but we were forced to do that because we needed to, there were cuts, there were cuts that were made that we had to reinstate.

The biggest line item in that $4 million uh is the $1.1 million to police salaries.

But uh I think I have an itemization of all of them later on in this slide.

So the reason I highlighted that $502, that's really my compare to basis right now.

Because again, we we we got $492 million adopted, $5.8 million was supplemented to that adoption, and we needed to add another $4.5 million.

This is just a quick recap of taking a look at where we were in 2026, what is new in 2027?

So I did this on a very high level.

We had school department requests of uh 23 that incre uh an increase of 23.2 million dollars.

That would that would represent uh that would represent uh to the school department folks here back to their original budget of $267 million that they presented to the school committee, and another $20 some odd million dollars for uh non-school sp net school spending eligible costs.

So that their total package was $289 million, and that would represent the $23 million increase.

Plus, we also allocate the cherry sheet assessments that relate to education.

That's for school sending and for charter school uh assessments as well.

So the school uh increases were $25.3 million.

Uh there's also another line item for school debt.

I called that out separately.

School debt is not allocable to the school department, but I called it out because I use it in my own uh distribution of school versus city costs because this is debt that relates specifically to school projects.

The reason why it's not allocable to the school, however, is that DESI takes the uh takes takes the uh stance that school property belongs to the city.

So it's uh it's it's uh it's our buildings to keep to keep repairs on.

So we cannot charge in any way, shape, or form that back to the school, but it is a line item that did increase, and therefore it makes the slide.

Other salary step increases that that were earned during the year, uh, or that would have been that our plan to be earned during the year are a million dollars.

We have uh Cola base increase of uh $528,000 for um uh I'm sorry, I'm I'm jumping in gun here.

The um $528,000 are for the step increases the uh for the existing contracts, rather.

Uh pension assessment went up $3.7 million.

This is no surprise we have a very aggressive pension funding schedule to go to between now and 2035 at 2035 is up for discussion.

I've already had some discussions with uh Council of Pereira amongst others and Eric uh Cohen at the uh retirement board.

We we're going to present some ideas after 2027 on what we can do to lower those costs.

I must point out, though, that the assessment is is already in place.

PEREC assesses us based on the 2024 valuation.

So that's a locked number this year.

$3.7 million it is.

Nothing we can do about that.

Uh health insurance increases, $4 million five million.

Uh then I I lined item these these items, vehicle fuel and utilities.

That's a small increase, but I'm going to show you why I put this down in a minute, because the real cost that we have had to add to the budget are much higher since the original budget was uh requested from department heads.

Waste collection, that $280,000, that represented DFFM's best guess of where waste contract bids would come in.

It represents a 3% increase over capital's third year.

I believe that was just keeping pace with the first two years called for 3% increases.

So they carry that forward.

What we did eliminate was uh that should, I'm sorry, that should say OPEB.

We had subsidies for OPEB, uh subsidies for uh enterprise funds and a $250,000 uh payment that we were making out of our general out of our out of our budget to uh to go towards our OPEB funding, in addition to the 10% that we set aside in free cash.

Uh we had to eliminate those this year.

And uh the only real other cut that worth noting is Iterion, a contract went down, was $495,000 a year for the first two years, and then it's $395,000 for the remaining, I believe it's five years.

So that's the only true cost reduction we were seeing at uh you know, other than small things.

Additional increases that happened after the budget request came in.

So fiscal twenty-six, as I had said back in last year, and I will point out again this year, uh fiscal twenty-six did not include anything other than de minimis reserves for our three big union settlements, AFSME unit A, police, and fire.

It's never been the city's practice to budget what we think those contracts are going to settle in for because that becomes public information, and we don't know to tell you the truth.

We wouldn't know how those negotiations are going to go on until we go through uh the ultimate uh final agreement with ASME, but uh we have JLMC hearings coming up for police and fire.

So what happened this year is with no other there was no nothing in for ASME increases, STEP or COLA.

So we settled with AFSME, I think in April, and uh we put before you a council order asking for funding for that contract, which you approved.

This is the second year of that contract.

It's $953,000.

So that's a complete add on to anything we had in 2026.

Okay, utilities, electric and natural natural gas.

Those numbers I showed you were uh before, they were only 60, I think it was sixty-three thousand dollars, sixty-nine, seventy thousand dollars.

We had to up that by nine hundred thousand dollars.

This is because we got the energy office came in with their um new estimates of electricity costs for the year, and uh we saw substantial increases uh what uh what Tyler is projecting in each of the buildings in the city.

And along the same lines, uh vehicle uh fuel is going up by $395,000.

That increases solely, I uh solely because of the Iranian conflict.

Our gas and diesel prices went up by a dollar to a dollar twenty-five, literally in a two-week period in uh from late February to mid-March last year.

So we jumped out that and got and got our budgets increased to show the rates that were in effect as of March.

Now, if the crisis resolves itself, prices come back down as we all hope they will, uh there'll be savings there.

But right now, we did not assume that that was going to happen.

We assumed the best information we had at hand at the time, and that was the current pricing that we're getting from from our um suppliers.

Waste collection and disposal.

This was a killer, quite frankly.

Uh I got very nervous when Fall River opened their bids two weeks before we did, and uh they had uh they had the same players bid on their contracts, and suddenly we're looking at rates in the neighborhood of $15 million.

That's what Fall River had uh had come up with.

Well, fortunately, because we have uh our own facilities uh that uh uh Crabo Hill, our cost a little bit lower, but the winning apparent winning bid right now is at $13.2 million next year.

And we had we paid $9.3 million this year.

That's that minus uh uh that $280,000 I showed in the last slide has to be added with this three $3.4.

We have a $4 million increase just from solid waste.

Fire watch was something we had to add as well.

This uh this is the um this is a fire watch that we've had at um at uh the um NEVS property um down by the railroad tracks.

Uh we have to have a fire watch for 24 hours a day uh for the full year.

Now we've we're able to make some cuts on that later on.

We're making some assumptions that uh that the watch will not have to continue all year.

But the facility, the EPA has to finish its cleanup, and uh the site has to be secured, and we'll we might have some solutions to that.

But that $517,000 represents an officer and a lieutenant uh with coverage for $247, $365 next year at detail rates.

Uh finally, all other expenses, we can go over those as uh each department comes up.

All other expenses added up to uh $728,000.

There are numerous across all departments, so I didn't take the time to itemize them.

So what we've done now, we started at $502.

We had baseline increases that we just talked about at $37 million.

I just talked about the the extra six point nine million we had to add on.

This is where we went to work to try to come up with uh a way to get the budget balanced.

So there again is the $4.557 million dollars that I talked about at the beginning of this presentation.

Uh $2.5 is in net school spending eligible, and a $2 million placeholder for now for non-eligible expenditures.

Now the biggest one is transportation.

We are not saying that the school should cut their budget by $2 million.

We've got a placeholder in.

I've been talking with David at the school department about other uh about comparables with other communities to see if there is room to move on to transportation.

But in the meantime, this is going to this I anticipate a lot of this is going to be given back to the schools through a supplemental budget once the final budget or once the final state budget is enacted.

Our goal is to hit the net school spending as close to 100 percent as possible.

This is the second year we have done it this way, and no, it hasn't been done that way in the past.

We take we sort of uh call the end to this process once the uh either the House or the Senate versions of Cherry Sheet 8 come out.

But any changes to Cherry Sheet Aider assessments affect the amount that we have to give the school department because that's part of the net school spending formula.

Some of the other cuts.

You've heard about uh most of these by now.

Unit C Cola, 555,000, unit C step increases, no step increases from July 1st to uh 26 to June 30th of 27.

Uh that's the period of time that that covers.

That's 454,000.

Um the ASME positions, ASPE NUNEC positions that have been eliminated uh the that again on my first slide I pointed up there's 94 positions in total.

Uh 58 were vacancies, 36 are other reductions, reductions to uh positions where there is an incumbent in them.

Uh those include uh ASME unit C, fire, and police.

So I broke them out for each separate line item.

The AFSME piece is a million is uh two million dollars.

The fire company uh that the mayor had alluded to uh last the week, 1.4.

Now I know 1.8 was said uh the reason that that 1.4 is this is because the other piece of the the puzzle is the the amount of savings for health insurance.

That I showed as a separate line item.

It's the same 1.8 million dollars that you've heard, but it's just showing up as 1.4 here and as um as uh part of the $123,000 down below.

Uh the the uh police reductions, police uh have 24 vacancies right now, and all of those vacancies would take them down to 232 sworn offices from the compliment they have now, which is 256.

So that just includes not filling any of those vacancies.

Therefore, there's no health savings uh associated with with that action.

Uh and finally the HHS consolidation.

Five departments uh are being rolled into health and human services, which is I've been told by Sharon, who used to be an acting director of the old department, that that was uh the uh an active department in the city is much about 10, 15 years ago.

So comes around and goes around.

But uh that savings produced um uh almost a million dollars.

The um I I showed you the health benefit line item separately.

Uh this this reason this is obviously in uh a give back.

The the 36 reduction in force is going to translate into unemployment benefits of $772,000.

So that's been factored in.

And all the other reductions that we've made, there is a there's a long list of them.

Um they they're not small, they all start around $10,000.

But that's I don't have that with me now, but I do have that uh uh I can produce that list for you if you wish to see that.

So where we're at is a proposed budget of $535 million.

That represents a 6.5 percent increase over the comparable base of 502.

As you can see here, the with the school department, I have three $328 million, and I I footnoted it all through this presentation so far.

Those are direct school costs, right?

Those are that's the $289 million dollars the school requires put together and their school committee budget.

Uh plus it is uh an assessment for uh vote tech, which is uh something that uh we pick up here as well, and also um uh the Chapter 70 uh assessments as well.

What it doesn't include at this point are the indirect allocations for pension and for um and for administrative costs, and also as I carved it out separately on this line item, we can't allocate debt to the school department, but for purposes of the pie charts that I've been using and the mayor has presented, we put the school piece of debt into those numbers to show that it's a school oriented or school originated cost.

Quick look at where we stand on that 535 million.

And this is uh this is a chart that the this is the pretty much the exact chart that the mayor had used, except that I I made I picked up a fourth sub slice here where the previous version only had three.

School representing school and other educational costs representing almost two-thirds of the budget.

Uh all of these others are pretty much locked.

We talked about the pension, that can't change.

That assessment is already in the books.

Health insurance that we have budgeted, which is $24 million, that is uh every active that is the current roster of enroll of employees and retirees enrolled in the various plans that they're enrolled in at the premiums that are in existence right now, plus a 10 percent increase that we are assuming is going to happen on January 1st.

So that does not have any uh any growth in it at all for new positions, that's our new positions in this budget.

We don't we don't do that uh when we budget health insurance, we always budget it with the existing enrollments as of just before this budget, which is March 31st.

So that is a and I might point out that the old way we used to do uh health insurance was to allocate actual medical bills.

We got off of that system, uh as did the most of the rest of the state some time ago.

We use the the premium basis or the working rates basis.

So 25 percent comes out of an employee's paycheck, 75 percent match from the employer.

It is that 75 percent match that adds up to the 24.4 million dollars that we have budgeted for health insurance this year.

So there is no real uh other than the increase that's going to happen on January 1st, there's no uh it's pretty much a locked number.

This is the existing people with existing rates.

Uh this slice here is just the various things that um that are mandated or not in discretionary, but it's kind of lumped in all together.

Debt service for the city, insurance payments, that would include general insurance and life insurance, uh, and other assessments too.

We get assessed from the state as well as the school does.

So our assessment piece is about two million dollars.

And finally, a big slice of it is waste collection now.

This the last quadrant here, not even a quadrant, really, it's only about twelve uh only about twenty percent, represents traditional department expenses.

We broke it out into public safety and all other general government.

So you can see we really only have uh 17.8 percent.

That's uh a little bit, that's roughly about one-sixth of our entire budget is is housed in departmental requests.

Just another just a quick recap of the numbers that drive this pie chart.

You see the 65.9 percent from school, and the municipal uh represents the balance for 100 percent.

We I compare it to how we were last year at this time, and it shows an overall increase this year of six point five percent.

I took that pie chart here and just built it into a stack table so we can compare it to the costs that have uh that we've been incurring over the last three years.

And you can see it's been slightly uh slight increases in each of the categories here as the budget has built up, but the composition has has stayed mostly the same except non-discretionary now, it's been picking up.

And that's because of the increases to debt service with the with the bonds that we've been issuing over the last couple of years and the pension assessment.

So more and more of our stack is being composed of the green area here, which is non-discretionary, and hence it's creating a lot of the problems that we face now.

Before I go here, what I did was I this is 2027, and I show you percentage-wise, the same, this is the exact same stack, but I show it to you as a percentage over 2026.

So the point of doing this is that our effective increase is almost 7.7 percent.

So in other words, if you have 65.9 percent of your costs, which are in school, uh and they're going up by 7.6 percent, that's 5.1, uh, 5.0, and you add them all up, the effective rate is 7.7.

What I'm saying here is that it would take an overall increase of revenue of 7.7 percent to make the fund, the general fund balance.

I'm sorry, this is a little bit busy, but I thought it would be nice to somewhere in this deck to put an actual summary of the budget book that you have seen.

Uh again, it goes over the same numbers.

Uh your $535 million is the proposed budget this year compared to the to the revised budget with supplements included of last year, $502 million, $32 million increase, 6.5 percent growth.

Here are the funding sources that we're looking at.

The one thing about uh the foundation budget uh has been going up around 6.6, 6.7 percent every year.

But the nice thing too is that the cherry sheet revenue uh to fund that uh good chunk of that budget goes up by six point seven percent as well.

So uh the problem the the defer, the difference, which is the local share, which is uh which is actually computed through uh through um through by DESI, but it involves basically involves enrollment by uh by class and it involves certain kind of uh demographic and socioeconomic factors as well.

So this year, for instance, on uh the fourth Wednesday of January, DESI came out and said the city has to spend $314 million on education.

Last year it was $295 million, so that's a 6.6 percent increase.

They gave us uh revenues to uh to fund the difference and leave us with the with the local share piece.

That local share piece is uh uh is a 40 or 50 million dollars before you get to the NSS ineligible expenses, which are predominantly transportation.

Uh the municipal share, not so good.

Uh the mayor has talked about this, I have talked about this quite some time.

We don't get much.

Uh, the biggest component of municipal aid is is the unrestricted general government aid.

And I I will show you the same slide that I have showed people for the last two or three years, and the mayor has also showed it quite a bit too.

Just that this the UGGA has not kept up with inflation.

It hasn't re just just now has recovered to its 2010 high before it broke down and it used to be the uh the lottery aid.

Uh they changed that whole formula around and they uh and they when they enacted 9C cuts back in 2010 or so, and we're just catching up now.

So only now getting the same dollar uh uh dollars for UGGA that we got uh 15, 16 years ago.

Just a brief note on each of the revenue items, and I just mentioned this already.

The Chapter 78 went up by 277 million.

When you take all of the the pieces of uh of the education component, which is the nets which includes net school spending inelligibles in the regional assessments, we're left with a delta of 76 million dollars.

This has to be covered in our property tax base.

So our overall base is uh 170 million dollars, so about 75, 76 million is due to covering the net the local share uh of education costs plus other assessments, plus the uh non the net school spending inelligibles.

Municipal aid by contrast went up by only three point thirty-one million.

Local receipts, uh this is an opportunity, I hope.

Uh we had not seen much growth in local receipts this year by the time we had the cut off for this budget.

So consequently, there's only a 1 percent overall increase in local receipts.

That's what we assume based on what we do is we do a trailing 12 month look back at local receipts, and we see how it's how it compared to uh the uh we set the budget up at that at that using those trillion 12 months.

Uh the division of local services looks at this quite closely.

We can't estimate local receipts that are higher than our most recent 12-month trillion 12-month period when we go in and have our tax rate set.

So we have to assume zero growth here.

The reason why we have the 1.1 percent end is because the current 12 trillion 12 months suggest that we're about 1 percent over.

The uh the extra 0.2 percent we are proposing as part of the solid waste contract, we are proposing an increase in mattress pickup fees.

So that that brings the effective increase up to 1.2 percent.

Uh and indirect costs, these are pretty much the result of uh the enterprise fund budgets.

This is the enterprise fund share of indirect costs that that uh that the city incurs on its behalf.

And this is that slide I was referring to.

Uh $12.6 million delta between what we do get in unrestricted general government aid and what we would have gotten had we kept pace with 2009's the pre-9C cut uh late aid plus the uh an increase for CPIU each year since then.

We could have been at 42 million dollars, uh, but we're at 29.4.

Just taking a quick look at uh this the one thing I want to point out with this slide.

It's it's it's in part to show the piece of our budget that we fund through property taxes.

But the the bigger emphasis here is this red slice that doesn't look so big when you compare it to the entire budget.

But uh this is the one-time funds that we have been using to get the budgets balanced since basically since the pandemic.

You can see it's it can be pretty sizable.

Uh I have another sh slide where I'll talk about the sources briefly.

But this is part of this is sort of been uh uh a source that's masked the fact that we have been under a structural deficit for some time now.

We have had to use general fund and in some cases uh recently we have had to use medical claims trust funds.

We have had to use other sources of of I won't even call them revenue, really they are savings accounts that we've had to had to uh use to fund the budget, uh the difference between what we are collecting in real revenues and how much we have to spend through the uh through the uh operation of city government.

So when I this is the this is the amount for the entire general fund for the for the past seven years.

If I strip out school, this is what is left in the municipal side.

And you can see that the red looks a little bit more significant when you're comparing it to just the school to just the municipal piece.

None of these one-time only fixes are needed for the school department because we do get the net school spending compliance and we use property taxes to take care of all of our local share.

We don't need to do anything else to balance that budget, but we do need to use other sources for the municipal side.

Taking this red line, which is still not overly uh uh apparent when you even when you strip out school, but if I carve it out by itself, these are the sources down below and the amounts up above of the one-time money we have been using for the last six years.

Uh you can see that um the the biggest the biggest shares are of free cash.

We have had to fund a lot of our uh our proposed budgets that had been reduced by the council.

We've been through this um through many, many meetings over the last three years.

There are things that have to happen.

Uh one of the biggest examples is solid waste, of course.

When I first came back here uh to take on the CFO role in 2023, that was the year the council had uh cut general government unclassified by $7 million.

That represented a 54 percent increase uh uh cut to every single component of general government unclassified.

Uh the biggest share of that was solid waste, but there are other things in there such as uh general insurance and Medicare taxes that are withheld from employees' paychecks.

Those can't be cut.

Uh so we came back several times through supplementals.

We did get two million dollars approved through a supplemental, but the balance of that we had to fund for the fee cash.

So here's an example of uh reductions to the budget that we then had to use free cash for because we couldn't use, we couldn't build them into the tax rates.

And uh that process has happened in each of these years, and uh I think the sum total is it's gonna be well over 35 million dollars that we have had to use to balance our budget.

I think that's the last of the slots.

So I I wanted to end on that note because that's that's the concern that we have.

Um it's a struggle when your general fund expenditures are going up in terms of six to ten percent, mostly in areas that you can't control, and your revenues are not growing that fast.

You have got um local receipts growing at 2.5 percent, and you know the proposition two and a half um ceiling on uh the tax levy is two and a half percent.

So that's only so much we can raise revenues, but the sky is the limit on the expenditure side as we have seen.

So the use of the one-time money in the past has not been included in the budget, obviously, this year.

So we are budgeting uh our uh our entire budget is based on current revenues to fund current expenditures.

And uh that's the reason why we have had to come up and make so many cuts this year.

Um that's pretty much all I have to say for the time being.

I will go into uh obviously the uh with the departmental uh meetings start next Tuesday night.

And so more of the specific things about department requests and cuts that the city has taken.

We can go into more depth with that later on.

Uh but for the time being, uh I think I just wanted to keep this at a higher level, see if anybody has any high level questions right now.

I can't really be prepared to answer a lot of specific department uh questions because we will need the department heads there to defend their own budgets, but uh certainly on the general uh the from the general city side, this would be a good time.

Okay.

Um, colleagues, I just want uh I'll take a quick survey of the room.

That the uh thank you, Bob, for your presentation before us.

I appreciate it.

It took a little longer than I expected.

Uh do we want to have the school department get up and then we'll ask Bob questions after so those folks can get home, or do we want to just get our questions out of the way to Bob quickly?

Get our questions out of the way because then the school department was prepared and actually gave us copies of their presentation.

Did we not get one, Bob or Sharon?

Because that's customary to give us the first time.

I am sorry.

We did not.

Okay.

I just wanted to make sure it's a good department gave us one.

I can print them out right after the.

No, you don't have to now.

It's already over.

But if you could email it uh to the office so we can just get a copy.

But the school department also has a lengthy presentation as well.

But I just wanted to yeah, if we could just ask questions.

Sure.

But I just wanted to make note of that in the future as you are aware of the the Council Averroes.

My apologies on that one.

Uh thank you, uh, Mr.

President.

Um Thank you, Bob, for coming here.

I just I'm sure you are well aware of the December 11th, 2025 article uh in the New Bedford Light that talks about uh us being under a budget by 4.8 million and just you know I think Colin Hogan interviewed you talking about uh how we had a a 4.8 million dollar surplus based on its better than expected expenditures, uh, plus $8.5 million from better than expected tax receipts.

So that gave us a surplus of just over $13 million.

I just don't understand the $50.7 million swing the other way to get us so negative.

That's a lot.

Well, one of the big drivers for the revenue success last year was was closing out the uh cable access funds.

That was taken in as uh so cable access became an enterprise fund in 2018, and when it did so, it uh no longer was a special revenue fund.

Those money should have been turned over to the general fund.

Um we actually executed on that uh during last year, and we should recognize that as revenue, and then as you will recall, we then we then set it aside for a stabilization fund that happened in this fiscal year.

So that drove a lot of that increase.

Um the other big increases that we tend to get each year are local receipts.

When we we have to come in with the budget for our local receipts that equals the trailing 12 month averages I mentioned before.

Uh if we're fortunate enough, we'll break that, and that's what we usually do.

That's our biggest source of s of uh surplus revenue.

I don't have the exact breakdowns because I I could produce them, but like off the top of my head, I I'm not sure on the the 2025 numbers.

Uh that was also a year that we did not, for the first time, I believe in the city's history, we did not go over budget in a single account.

173 separate budget lines, and we stayed within budget every single time.

So there were no deficits in any accounts, there was only turnbacks.

Um again, you know, this is the this is also 25 was a year that we we didn't have any union or uh any union contract increases.

We had uh more reasonable solid waste numbers under the original capital uh capital waste contract, uh, you know, electricity and gas and uh diesel fuel hadn't skyrocketed like they did this year.

Um there's a number of different things.

It goes back to that slide that I presented before.

But it is it it it one year's surplus doesn't mean the next year is going to be a surplus.

Every year is a separate stands on its own.

Okay.

Um state obviously not catching up with inflation since 2008, the formula not being fixed.

Um I'm told that we're about seven or eight cents behind where we should be per dollar in in reimbursement.

Is that correct?

We get about twenty-eight cents on a dollar, twenty-seven, and we should be around thirty-five, is that correct?

Or might be seven cents on dollar of in terms of what?

Uh for every dollar on reimbursement from the state.

So we should we uh I believe it should be we should be getting about thirty-five, thirty-six cents back from from that the the output, the input from the state, the output that we put, us taxpayers, us getting excuse me, that money back into our conference here in the city.

I mean, talk about that formula though.

That formula needs to be fixed.

It hasn't kept up with inflation.

There's a lot of problems, and I know you can't answer that.

You're not on the hill, but you speak of that just a very little bit, and I know we've got to move this along.

But well, so uh uh unrestricted general government aid is a combination of the old state lottery fund plus a little miscellaneous fund they called um I I think it was called miscellaneous.

That was all formula-driven back in 2028, 2008.

20 oh I should say.

Uh and then when the 9C cuts came, they froze every community at that rate.

And after that, every community shares the up until this past year in the Senate Ways and Means version is changing that distribution a little bit, but every single municipality since 2008 just gets the same bump uh that the State allows.

Like last year, for instance, we had 2.5 percent.

Every single community, Brockt, Fall River, Lynn, Lawrence, everybody got the same 2.5 percent increase in on unrestricted general government aid.

So it's really not tied to anything any longer.

Uh so that's why I'm not sure about what I can't answer that seven cents on a dollar.

I'm not sure where that comes from.

All right.

Thank you.

I Mr.

President, I'll yield for now because I know we have to keep the flow going.

We have a pretty large presentation from the schools.

I had other questions, but I'll yield.

I think my colleagues may have some of the similar questions that I was going to have.

So I'll step aside for now.

Thank you.

Okay, counselor.

Thank you.

Chair Mrs.

Counselor Burgo.

Uh Bob, uh the first question I guess I have the big picture questions.

Um who is going to be in charge of health and human services?

I am not sure if the uh the administration has announced that yet.

Okay.

Because I do see in there there's a director of public health still and an assistant director.

There's the director of veteran services, director of counsel on aging, right?

And then the executive aid, which I assume is still for the licensing, but there's still staff for community services.

So then who would they be reporting to if their department head is no there's no director of community services anymore.

So then who would they have report to?

I would have to defer to the mayor's office because that would they would be the ones that make the appointment.

I'm not sure they announced anything yet.

Okay, so they haven't figured that out yet.

All right.

That's good.

I'm not sure if they figured it out or not, but they just haven't announced one.

It wouldn't be my place to do that.

And will we be getting a full list of all the positions that have been shifted around?

Because like, for example, in the assessor's office, there it looks as though on the the sheet that is at the beginning, they have a reduction of one staff member.

Yes.

But in actuality, uh there's one less body, FTE-wise, but there's three new positions or three reclassifications potentially.

And again, that might be a question for whoever is going to present for the assessors, but the administrative manager that's an M9, a compliance officer that's M6, and a project coordinator.

Um those never existed before in the assessor's office, at least not in FY26 budget.

We can look into that.

There's not a head count that there may have been increases or change during the year.

Okay.

Like someone might have gotten um, someone might have gotten uh bumped.

What some what happens during the year is that uh a job gets reassessed from time to time.

There is this thing called the job assessment uh questionnaire, JAQ goes to HR, and HR determines whether if the position if the person is doing work above the position.

So that can happen.

So that might be the case in in this particular situation.

But the uh the one reduction to assessor because there's a vacancy and we're not filling that vacancy.

That's part of the 58 vacancies that the mayor had uh addressed last week.

And then those three positions would have just been reclassified.

Yeah, they would have been the same piece.

Potentially.

So then basically all those because that that's not the only that was just my example.

But so basically your recommendation is when those department heads come forward, ask them about those, they'll be prepared to answer that.

Yes, a departmental level question would be better.

Okay.

The other question I have about the budget book this year compared to last year's is why are why don't we have a breakdown of all the contractual services?

Last year we had a whole section that had the contractual services that were very detailed, and it was a whole breakdown to like the copier paper, um uh dues and subscriptions, and that's not in this budget.

That's what the blank pages.

Uh unfortunately in my cover my transmitter letter, I pointed out we had gotten overwhelming compliance from our departments this year, uh to the tune of something like I think three or four thousand online items of detail.

And my apologies, but we ran out of time to to actually include it in the budget books, and we promised to have it out uh in time for the first the city departmental hearings, which would be Tuesday night.

Um we would we would we would distribute it as an exhibit sort of what was done with the old personnel rosters before we embedded them into the book.

So we will get details on all the breakdowns.

Okay.

Um in your opening remark well earlier in your remarks about an hour ago, um you were talking about uh the CIP and how typically like smaller items uh we would include, like for example, I know that the school department was looking for 150,000 for vehicles, but for some reason it wasn't included in the CIP.

I'm just curious why it was added to their non-net school spending uh cost as opposed to being included in this last CIP.

Well, for the CIP we had uh there was three vehicles.

Um I I can't recall the amount, but they were included in the CIP though.

$220,000, I believe was the grand total.

Well, there were vehicles from them and uh other departments.

But then I know that under there was uh when I went to their budget presentation, they included uh 150,000 dollars that was not approved to be in the la this past CIP.

Oh, so so you uh are you referring to the one the presentation that they just had?

Correct.

Yeah, okay.

So what happens there?

The most recent CIP is the one that we just had passed.

Uh that's in the so what happens is those requests get pushed off just like the other three million dollars here, they're gonna be in the CIP that we're going to be putting together for this year.

The other question I had the mayor during his address mentioned only three million dollar reduction.

I don't know if you remember that to the school budget.

That was in his address.

We could play that back, but you mentioned it's 4.5 discrepancy.

The mayor was referring to the Chapter 70, the net school spending piece.

Oh, that was so that's the um that's before the three million uh the two million dollars.

I think that and he may have he may have been rounding off to the nearest million, but it was like 2.6, 2.7 million.

Yeah, 2.5, yeah.

Um 2 million five hundred fifty-six.

Um but that that's and then two million dollar cut to their transportation line.

Are we not concerned about that two million dollar cut to the transportation?

I know we can make up on the net school spending line that we technically can go under net school spending.

I know this administration doesn't care about that.

But when it comes to transportation side of it, it's very difficult when I see a lot of times I do get phone calls from uh parents when their kids are s having difficulties uh getting on a bus because there is not enough room on buses, and now we know that this administration has reduced the school department's transportation cost by another two million dollars.

And I'm worried about what that will do to the school's transportation that's already hurting.

Yes.

So I I have had conversations with uh with David Flynn about this.

Um as I said before, it's not the administration, we the administration are not proposing a two million dollar cut to transportation.

We did hold back the two million dollars on that line item.

What do you mean you are not proposing a two million dollar cut?

Well, no, there's a reduction in that line item, but it's a more of a holdback until we see what the Chapter 70 formulas finish up of the Cherry Sheet Aid and the cherry sheet assessments that won't be finalized until July.

Okay, so you at that point we will the similar to what we did last year, we will make them whole for the time.

Okay.

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

That's all.

Thank you.

Chair Agnes Council Show Cut.

Good evening.

Thank you, Mr.

President.

Thank you, Bob.

It's okay, Council, you'll get your turn.

I don't know if this is a question you can answer here, or you might have to send me the material.

I don't see the breakdown.

Um I would like to see the commercial revenue before it's been corrected with the difference in tax over the last three years.

So pure the pure commercial tax revenue.

Oh, the other over the last three years.

So that I'd like to see it because one could probably assume you can gauge whether the economy around the city is growing, remaining stagnant, or contracting based upon that value before taxes are raised against it.

Sure.

That would be very interesting.

We have rip uh real estate taxes are broken out, obviously, well, real estate and personal property, broken out by residential, industrial property.

I want to see business development.

Yep.

Okay.

Can you email that to me?

Yes, sure.

All right.

Thank you.

I yield, Mr.

President.

Thank you.

Council Oops.

Thank you, Council President.

So, Bob, two quick questions.

One on the solid waste.

How many people bid on the new contract for solid waste?

Well, three, but one only bid on the recover on the recycling facility, so they were deemed non responsive.

So it was two.

So two.

And then just for the general public clarification.

The last time we did a the garbage contract.

How long was that for and how many people bid on it?

So it was done before I came back.

But I can tell you that it was for three years.

I don't know how many people bid.

Was it at least two?

Wasn't it a I thought it was a sole source?

No, no.

I know that capital waste bid and waste management.

Can you provide me with the last refuge contract that we signed, as well as all the bid sheets for it?

Yeah, I'm sure we could define that.

And then I know you mentioned CIPs and vehicles.

We used to buy them with cash.

We used to lease them.

So now can you for the next CIP, can I get a list of all the vehicles being retired versus the useful life of that vehicle, and then a structure of the loan falling mass general loss, Chapter 44, Section 7, which states the useful life of a vehicle and the financing for it?

Because I want to make sure we're not going out too long on some of these vehicles that have extremely short lives that I know Mass General Law normally says with a vehicle, unless it's a fire apparatus, you need you can go out longer than that five-year period.

Yeah, so I think you're saying are we using vehicles beyond their useful lives?

And I can tell you the answer is going to be yes.

Yeah, but I just want to see the breakdown of the vehicles that are retiring, the useful life of that vehicle and everything else.

Okay.

Sure.

Okay.

Because I know that I've heard some stories about some of the vehicles that have not had their full useful life and we're replacing them.

So one of the the discussion points that we had in the CIP this past go around was to build out a full replacement schedule.

Uh I I know that EMS has done a good job in doing that.

The other departments we're working with right now to get a traditional schedule so you can see the major pieces.

Uh obviously there's a lot of rolling stock, small things, and and the full fleet is like almost a thousand pieces, but we don't want to do that much.

But just the ones that are being retired.

That's all.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

Thank you.

Council Roy.

Thanks, Mr.

President.

Uh hi, Bob.

You know, the this $32 million number, and and I appreciate you going over um all the numbers before, but I'm thinking back to like the mayor's state of the city address and thinking back to the mayor going on the radio, you know, like a couple weeks later, and and then to him addressing this body presenting his budget.

And the number went from 18 million to 28 million, and now it's at 32 million.

All right.

How does that happen?

Like how how does how does something like that, you know, go from 18 to 32?

Can you can you just give us just a a whirl on that?

Well, that was the starting point, obviously, that we started with.

That was the gap that we opened with.

Uh so the first numbers that were quoted were uh were in all likelihood, I have to double check.

We're in all likelihood not counting the department requests what we call enhancements.

Uh there's really no difference in the end between a baseline request and an enhancement request, uh, except that we give a lot more assurance that we're going to include baseline costs with within the budget.

But departments did ask for eight uh $7.5 million of enhancements for new programs and new initiatives.

Okay.

And that was not part of the first $18 million.

Uh I guess the 28 to 32 is probably undoubtedly because of the solid waste contract opening.

But what happens is all during the year from from the fourth Wednesday of January when the numbers first open with the with the uh governor's budget submitted, uh when she submits her budget, uh, those numbers change throughout.

We get assessment notices from all the different everybody who assesses us, Bristol Laggy, Great and New Bedford Vogue Tech, uh Charter School, well the Charter School I already probably counted pension assessments.

There's a number of different things that come in, in addition to the department requests, and then with the department requests, we sit down, we go over them.

And then with the department requests, we sit down, we go over them.

Sometimes we find out that departments didn't ask for enough.

One of the cases was with uh with um fuel, diesel and uh gas.

I think it maybe it was enough of a request at the time it was done, but uh that um but we did a look back and pick up another 400,000.

Electricity is a big one.

We didn't have any numbers.

You guys didn't know enhancements were coming down the pipe when the mayor gave us state of the city departments didn't uh the state of the city how many I mean departments usually ask for enhancements every year, right?

Uh yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I think that the number there was um uh I I'm not sure I have to see what number he used.

I'm not sure if he had the enhancement requests in them.

But whether they were whether they were or they weren't but they would we put them in and then we had to say no to them all.

So that's that's part of the number to get to the 32 million.

So maybe it was the 18 went to 32 in part because the mayor didn't pick up on the enhancements because I didn't send them to him, but now I have and then I took them back out.

So it's it's going to be one of those kinds of exercises though.

All right.

That's interesting.

All right so also Bob you um it's fair to say I'm just curious about like other municipalities in the area.

It's fair to say you you watch what other municipalities are like Thayan, Fall River.

Is like in could you explain why like cities like Fall River aren't maybe in the mess that we are in right now.

Are they doing something differently?

Can can you opine on that for a few minutes.

So Fall River just put his budget out I think it was last week.

I haven't been through it yet to be honest with you.

But they their State aid situation is a bit different than ours too.

I can go down to little things like they get a million six every year for um public safety grants from the State for part of the Gateway Cities program that only included ten gateway cities in its mix.

I'd have to take a look at what their net what their local share is for education to find out if they included um if they if they have an easier local share to meet than we do.

They don't have a pension issue like we do?

They should have pension issue.

Health care issue like we do rising they don't have rising health care costs.

They probably have a worse health care issue from what I hear.

But I mean so there's a section in our adoptive budget that we're going to add this year that compares us to uh ten other communities, five greater than us in population and five less than us.

The problem is getting information at this time of the year.

Many many municipalities are in different stages of their budget process.

Some put theirs out very early and others like Floor River just put theirs out just about the same time we did.

I have I can't find anything from Brockt yet.

They tend to go out a little bit later than the rest of us.

But we do comp and we are aware of what goes on.

But thank you.

And one more question can you talk about how the administration calculates net school spending versus how the district would calculate it.

It's a little different right you we took a more conservative approach.

So yeah so when you be the district I think you mean our uh the our teacher I could the district is just uh and I and I don't have David here to come uh to confirm this but they so I think the process started off with the traditional bottoms up budget where they went and built the budget you know by asking people what they need and they've and I'm sure they went through the processes of scrubbing that down.

And it came up to 267 million dollars somewhere around there.

And then David produced a net school spending schedule which is the same as we do, right?

We compute it the same way.

The big difference between the two organizations is what we are what we're assuming for pension allocations.

So the pension number is forty three million dollars somewhere around there right so in the past uh back in the back in the days of prior superintendents uh there wasn't very much available on how they allocated their pensions.

So we started formul uh we started um formalizing that a little bit more about two years ago.

Now with David and myself we didn't do a great job speaking to each other about the allocations last year it ended up with that David came in with the same allocation from the year before and I had much higher and we went back and forth a few times we ended up settling agreeing agreeing to disagree I probably I'd say is probably the best way to put it at a figure about 14 point one million.

This year what we did was um we kept pace with the foundation budget increase 6.6 percent.

So uh our allocation was based on the fact that uh we wanted to give schools 6.6 percent increase from the net school spending formula they got last year which was I think 236 or 238 million.

So we came up with 264.

So right now that's that's the discrepancy between um between the pension allocations.

Uh and what happens if the city um spends less on on the schools than we're supposed to?

If if we spend less on on the schools, then we have to make it up either through a supplemental increase or if it got as far as going to the end of year reports the school does, it would show a net school spending deficit.

We haven't had a deficit in net school spending since sometime we had we had hit a figure of about $8.3 or $8.4 million in net school spending deficits back in the 2018-2019 time frame, somewhere around there.

And uh we worked it off and got free uh around 21 or 22.

And we have been net school spending positive since then.

Um that hasn't happened.

That's not to say it couldn't, but uh right now it hasn't happened in any of the last um four or five years.

Because we have to make it up every year.

So we actually had to pay.

Do you think it's gonna happen this year?

I don't think it is, but it's the year hasn't even started yet.

So it's it's kind of hard to say.

Uh David and I still need to uh to come up with an agreement on what the pension allocation should be.

The problem is is that you don't get it assessed by uh by person or by organization.

You get one giant assessment for the entire uh for the entire system.

In fact, the city itself doesn't have its own assessment.

We uh we get allocated 88 and percent change somewhere around there by PARAC.

The only assessment, the only actuarial report is done is for the entire system of five employers.

So that's where it gets to be a little bit difficult.

It's not as easy as say health insurance, where I know what you are, I know that you are in an HMO plan, you have a family plan, your premium is $2200 a month.

I got to cover 75 percent of it.

That's a that's a known thing.

Pensions not doesn't work that way.

Thank you.

So the the allocation that we use in our budget is sufficient enough to mark the fund uh the foundation budget increase of 6.6.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Chair recognizes Council Acani.

Yes, thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Um Bob, I just have I have a request.

Okay.

So I'm looking at the debt services.

Um 2025 was 9.2, 2026 it was 10.2.

In 2027, we have gone up approximately 2.5 million dollars in debt service.

That is a line item that we have to pay at 12 million seven five five.

Can I get a breakdown of what a line item of this individual debt services that we have added on to the $12 million?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

That's uh that's it.

Thank you, Mr.

President.

Uh just really quickly too.

Uh debt service, a lot of these items are under the CFO's budget.

He is going to be before us on June 1st.

So to any of my colleagues, that'll we'll have further uh breakdowns and and can make further requests of the individual accounts moving for uh on June 1st as well.

Thank you, Council.

I will point out that we include that information in the final budget.

We don't usually include it in the proposed budget, but we obviously have it available.

So your final budget report, your final adopted budget has a full listing of all the debt I imagine.

Um if you already have a prepared, I wouldn't mind if you would send me an email to me so I can look at it prior to the June 1st meeting.

We have we have a it's in a database, we would have to extract it out and make it look presentable.

But if you had it prepared, I would add like a as soon as I can.

Thank you.

Council Oliver.

Thank you, Mr.

President.

Thank you, Bob.

Um Bob, a couple of questions.

Um I know that you spoke about uh we spoke about this deficit, we are talking about future deficits and structural um deficiencies with uh using one-time payments.

When do we see that ironing itself out?

Whether it is one-time payments that we or one-time funding um solutions that we utilized are out of the out of the budget.

When are we when are we seeing that?

Well, we have to start doing things to fix the expenditure increases.

Okay.

So it is a couple of big items that we we are talking about already.

Uh and then there's going to be a lot more to come.

But let me give you a couple of examples.

One is that we are going to have to look at extending the the funding of the pension system from 2035 to something beyond.

Uh Eric Cohen from the retirement board right now is is assisting me uh by trying to ask the actuary, which is KMS actuaries for alternative fundings for 2023 2036 and 2040.

We don't want to go to 2040, but I want to know what that number could be.

So that will give us that will give us uh perhaps as much as three million dollars a year if we pick if we extend it out far enough.

Uh we are going to have to have talks on health care reform to some degree, right?

So it's it's whether we we have discussions with unions about the cost sharing uh for health insurance, whether it is existing employees or all employees hired after such and such a date.

A lot of the communities, I I believe the mayor touched on this in one of his presentations.

The local communities around Fall River uh in New Bedford have splits um for HMO versus PPO, they have active versus uh uh inactive um retirees rather, and they have uh splits for people hired before such and such a date and those hired after.

So that's on the table.

Perhaps plan redesign with the assistance of the PEC might be on the table.

As you know, without passing uh sections 21 to 23, we can't like propose our own plan designs and go to an independent arbiter uh to resolve any differences with the PEC.

We have to work hand in hand with the PEC.

So we will be pursuing doing that.

These are some of the big ticket line items.

Um but these are all the things we think about have to be like a million dollars or more.

Uh we've got to cover a good five or six of these kinds of items before we can really start solving the problem.

Then we can get into the smaller things, you know, with uh like cutting back on a certain type of contract or um reducing travel, things like that.

Those are those are the minor things that are not going to solve a structural deficit.

Okay, and I and I'm glad that you brought up 2123, because I'm s I'm assuming it's going to be falling on my desk soon from the from the administration requesting that.

I can't really get an answer as to what that would actually save.

We just hear where we hear it would save us money.

And we go on the radio or we tell the we say that the council refuses to adopt this, and it would save money.

Is there any idea on what that would ballpark realistically save?

Well, what would happen is you would we would bring in our health care consultants, uh locked in out of Boston, and uh they would come up with ideas on plan redesigns, copies, deductibles, certain types of things covered, perhaps getting into prescription plans, things like that.

Uh and then they'll propose ideas before to us and to the PEC, and um we would then try to come to an agreement.

Without 21 to 23, we don't have much say.

So adopt it to find out how much we could save.

Is that what I'm saying?

I'm sorry?

So adopt it to find out how much we can save.

Is that what we're doing?

What you would do is you're by adopting it, you're adopting a mechanism to resolve a discrepancy should a discrepancy happen.

And discrepancy can't happen until you actually start looking at plan redesigns.

So right now, there's it's it's we we talk about plan redesigns, but we haven't commissioned anyone to actually start that study yet.

Well, we talk about it, but what would just a modest plan redesign be?

Has anybody looked into that?

Yeah.

So uh well, you mean what what are the types?

Uh like I just want to know how much we're talking about when we're talking about discussing this or adopting it.

Yeah.

What what are we talking about?

All we hear is it's going to save money.

You are talking about a mechanism, not an actual savings.

I mean, it's it would be hard to say.

I mean, you want to increase uh office visit co-pays, you want to increase the deductible.

There's so many different options out there.

And like it's hard to pick anything.

And then just uh plain blunt answer.

Has the administration had any discussions with you about a possible proposition two and a half override?

No.

Okay.

No, that's uh that's uh I think the only discussions we have had is that that that is like that's beyond a break glass measure.

And matter of fact, I would think I would think closing down.

All of the safety centers would be a break glass measure too.

All of those cuts that you saw that we we had done were were to make sure we got to within proposition two and a half.

Um no discussions as far as you have had with the with the admission uh the administration.

I mean, sure, this is it's been brought up in the fact that you you have that as an option and like the administration is absolutely not that's that's a technically a discussion, yes, but not a serious discussion about implementing.

All right.

Thank you.

That's all.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Thank you.

Just a few quick questions, Bob, and then uh we'll we'll get on.

Uh you had spoken, uh Council Roy had brought up that uh comparing to Fall R uh to uh Fall River's budget or other communities you brought up that Fall River is having some uh you're thinking some issues with the health insurance.

They have uh they have health insurance costs.

So Fall River is one of the uh they probably wouldn't like me saying it's one of the dinosaurs in that they still allocate uh their general fund expenditures on a percentage of medical claims incurred, which is really not an acceptable way to do it.

So they tend to uh uh run the gamut of they they have to absorb the risk of health insurance costs increasing or decreasing all within their general fund.

We in many of the other communities, like for instance, Brockton, we pushed all of that risk to Medical Claims Trust Fund.

That is like your insurance company.

So the the city has a known amount for health insurance each year, and again, it's like enrollment times the plan.

So I think that might be um one of their problems.

They also I know that they are a GLP one uh approved.

They I think they allow GLP ones for for one full year for an employee where we do not.

There's lots of things like that.

I just was pointing that out because I know that Fall River is one of the communities that have adopted 21 and 23.

Yeah.

Um while they might budget it differently, they have this mechanism that could save money.

The other thing that I just wanted to point out, too, is in what you just the only other thing I would say is that the city at any time could go to the PEC and ask the PEC to look at these changes that would save money.

Yes.

Has that occurred recently?

Not to my knowledge, but that would be something that HR would be the champion of.

I haven't really spoken with Joseph.

HR would be the champion of.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Yeah, okay.

Personnel would have to do that.

They would work.

I know that he that José has lots of discussions with Locton about these types of things.

What's whether they formally present anything to the PEC, not to my knowledge.

But um, so so essentially the only thing that would change is the like you said, the mechanism.

The mechanism.

So we could be trying it consistently every month saying or every quarter, I think the PEC meets.

Hey, please adopt this so we save money.

Yeah, we could we could say to the PEC we want to go from 375 deductible, 375 to 750 family, we could say this double it.

No, not to my knowledge.

Any other questions?

All right.

Thank you, Bob.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Mr.

Superintendent.

As you're making your way up here, I just want to thank you and your staff uh and uh school uh fellow elected officials, the school committee members that are here.

Um thank you for being here.

We appreciate um you coming out uh for our uh budget presentation to us.

And uh sorry it took a little probably longer than anticipated, but I appreciate you hanging out and being here.

Sorry, yes, go ahead.

Thank you.

Uh good evening, Mr.

President.

Members of the council.

Um really appreciate the opportunity again to go over our FY 2027 budget.

Mr.

Flynn is not here, our normal schedule is after Memorial Day.

Um so uh he he had a pre-scheduled vacation.

So this is great.

I get the opportunity to put on the uh the finance hat again.

Um, as we have done in previous years.

However, this is good.

I I really appreciate going first, being early before Memorial Day, because we really want to have an in-depth conversation about our budget um with as many folks as possible.

This week I met with um a community group.

Um actually tomorrow I uh the whaler show, which is the New Bedford High School students show, they interviewed me on the budget, so this budget discussion will be broadcast to 2400 students.

We plan to meet with parent groups and others.

Um I will describe how we're gonna break down the budget for them.

Um I did hear that the school department has submitted a large uh presentation, so I'll move swiftly through it.

That's the feedback from the classroom.

This is this is your this is this is your time, unlimited side.

No, Monique.

But but again, um sometimes it's not as uh compelling as as it might appear to me.

Um but one one way we want to break it down just to give context is how we're talking to folks about the budget is in the three big buckets.

Um what's the revenue?

You've heard that term per pupil.

It's not really used very well.

Um it's misused, but the best way to break it down is what's per what's the per-pupil revenue, what's coming in to the school committee for them to budget, and then ultimately the budget book you have, those are the costs.

Where are the costs allocated?

That's accounting essentially, accounting for where the costs are going to fall.

That's what you see in the departmental and school breakdown.

And then I do want to make a pitch for um per pupil spending.

It's very clear um what information is out there.

I want to direct people to that if they're watching on cable, or when we talk to the our community partners and our parents and our students, even this budget season, we want to be able to show them that they can find this information on per pupil spending also.

Just to go back real quick, you know, I was talking about how I'm going back on the budget piece again, and I will say the first slide, we'll keep going.

It swipes.

Yes, I think.

Okay.

So I will say we talked to the school committee about this that we have had a track record since 2016 of stable budgets, and that's what we want to continue for next year.

You'll see around the state right now, almost all communities are affected.

Their school department budgets are affected.

I did see a headline, Brockton is laying off, some folks, et cetera.

And we always want to present a stable budget.

Those of us who've worked and served the district for a long time remember this period.

The pre-SOA period and pre stability period where you'd have layoffs, pink slips, you'd have school closures, all of that.

We haven't had that over the past ten years that I've been presenting budgets.

Obviously, there's been finance reform in Massachusetts, which has fed that, but that but also the tools we have and the information we can rely on, our ability to forecast the school committee's role.

The school committee meets twice per month and publishes publicly the budget and live tracking of our expenditures and transfers to cover any shortfalls in different accounts.

And so we want the public to know, the community to know how we oversee uh the school budget and sc and spending.

So I just want to start on revenue.

Um revenue you start from the cherry sheet, you start from chapter 70.

Our revenue is essentially chapter 70 plus the local contribution.

And folks can dig in and verify those numbers.

You go to the cherry sheet, you'll see the revenue that's coming, and you'll see the assessments, how much goes to charter schools, for example.

And then the state makes that promise.

The state says this is the legal requirement, the legal minimum.

That's what foundation is through the lawsuits through the 90s about how can we provide a basic education, an equitable education, the state says you have to provide a foundation.

But the deal is the state will kick in up to about 86% of that.

That's what chapter 70 is, if the city can demonstrate or city or town can demonstrate the match, the 14%.

And it's also broken down by category.

So these reports are on DESC's website where you can see how much the state plans to commit, how much the state says it will cost to educate the bare minimum for a new Bedford student next year, and it even advises what categories.

The state even calculates how much you should spend in each category of that minimum.

So of the minimum, it says that New Bedford should spend next year 11 million on administration.

We actually spend half that on administration, we spend half.

We spend one of the lowest administration in the state.

You'll see in the budget book.

Where we do spend more is we do spend more on things like counseling, student support, health services, special education.

We finally have been able to spend the minimum on maintenance.

We have a strong and growing maintenance and facilities staff who do a great job.

And we've finally been able to close what was called the teacher gap.

So we have more staff in schools, more paraeducators in schools.

So I won't spend too long on this, but just to know that it's all formula-based.

And this is basically there are 14,000 resident students in the charter schools and the public schools, and the city has to demonstrate once it gets to chapter 70 of 271 million, it has to demonstrate spending of 314 on those students for next year.

So it has to demonstrate that 43 million as part of the chapter 70 partnership.

That's what this looks like, state aid and the city contribution that should be demonstrated.

But what that looks like in practice is actually very different.

Because you have assessments for VOC, you have assessments for Aggie, you have assessments for the charter schools.

And when you actually break it down, once that match is demonstrated, once the minimum goes to every school's every school district, what you see is actually the contribution that ends up in New Bedford public school classrooms is far lower than ends up in Vogue, in Aggie or the charter schools.

Retiree health care is counted as a demonstration.

The school committee doesn't receive that.

The pension assessment is counted as a demonstration, the school committee doesn't receive that.

And so that essentially comes off the per pupil that goes into a New Bedford public school classroom.

So whereas up to $3,000 will go into a charter school classroom, up to $3,000 plus will go into the vocational agricultural school.

In some respects, about a thousand dollars of city contribution goes into a New Bedford public school.

Just I did see this report.

I want to make a plug for it when we're talking about revenue.

Mike Goodman, who's a public policy professor, well established at the UMass Dartmouth School of Public Policy, put out a New Bedford property tax simulation tool.

So you can actually see if you put in your assessed value, you can estimate your property tax bill for F for a previous year and see how much has been spent from that property tax on public schools.

You'll see that New Bedford Public Schools gets about $1,000 on a $4,500 bill, and the charter schools get about $500.

Now you'll note that the charter school population is 10%.

So it's half, but it should be lower to 10%.

So I just think it's an interesting tool to demonstrate how much revenue actually gets to the school committee to go into New Bedford classrooms.

So that's revenue.

It is very important.

That's one reason we've been able to present balance budgets.

We do a lot of work forecasting how much revenue will come in as early as possible.

But the real budget is costs.

Our goal is to meet all the costs to meet the needs of students next year.

And that again is primary focus of the budget book you were sent.

So the costs are broken down by 24 schools, 22 departments.

Mr.

Flynn and his budget team do a great job working with each of the schools and departments to have them forecast costs, have them forecast needs, and each one is broken out the forecasted budget in a page in the budget book.

But what really is driving costs are these categories.

So we want to headline, we want to maintain level service.

That's always our first test.

You test your budget.

What would it take to maintain the services we have now?

And that's the first test, level service.

And what would it take to retain all our positions?

Over that 10-year period, we've, in some respects, almost doubled school building positions, classroom positions.

We closed the teacher gap.

An elementary school 10 years ago in Newton would have had twice as many teachers or our educator staff as a New Bedford school.

We've closed that gap.

You'll see that, as we'll see.

I'll make a plug for our website where you can see the old books and the new book, and you can see that.

That's where the money has gone into buildings, into hiring teachers, paraeducators.

But now we want to retain those.

And those are negotiated contracts, collective bargaining agreements.

Our majority of our staff are unionized, obviously our educators.

And fortunately, we were able to settle those contracts all in one year.

The paraeducator contract, the unit A teacher contract, and the NBSSU, behaviorist wraparound folks, we settled all those in one calendar year, which is unique for a district, but then that allows us to forecast.

And those contracts, while obviously the cost of living and inflation is out of control for everybody right now, and it's hard to figure out what folks, what's an affordable cost of living, those contracts have record raises.

So we do have record hiring.

But that's a challenge.

How do we retain all the needed positions?

How do we keep those record coal increases for our collective bargaining units into next year?

So we'll talk about that.

The other major cost drivers are extraordinary costs.

So revenue might go up 6%, but other costs are going up way above six percent.

Education is expensive, inclusion is expensive, and we'll see that.

So for example, we'll just go back up to staff.

So we if our budget is increasing anywhere up to about 19 million, 10 million of that, 10 and a half million of that is for those staff contracts.

Our strategic plan actually says we're the largest employer within the city limits.

We are the daily workforce for the largest number of city residents.

We do have record hiring.

That's why when something breaks in New Bedford public schools, it gets fixed thanks to our maintenance staff, our custodial staff.

We have record staffing, so our schools are safer, more responsive, and making progress as we'll see.

We have wraparound to reach out to families.

So overall, all those increases are projected into next year.

That's about 10.6 million dollars.

But the real extraordinary increases are in special education.

Out of district tuition, the students with the most significant special education needs, that's a large portion of our budget.

No other city school pays within their budget.

That's the New Bedford School Committee pays for out of district tuition.

And that's going up by about two million dollars next year.

ABA, autism services, speech services, and nursing and other contracted services for students with needs, that's going up about two million dollars.

Those increases are closer to 10%.

But our special education programs are a source of pride.

Our model of inclusion within our schools are a source of pride.

I invite everybody May 28th to the next Special Olympics event at the McCoy field if you did miss the last one last week, and we have posting record graduation levels in special education programming also.

Health insurance, as we know, is going up again.

If the budget's going up 6%, health insurance is closer to 9%.

That's another $3 million in that $19 million increase.

Utilities also are going up, as we've heard, close to 10%.

Just put this picture up here of some of the utility work that we undertook last year.

The old schools, as we've heard in the old schools, have old fuse boxes, and it was long overlooked.

Those improvements weren't in any capital plan.

Those buildings aren't getting replaced, so the school committee invested some salary savings and redid the wiring at Winslow and Pachico and other schools.

Just some of the work that some of that maintenance investment.

So overall, this is where the increase is going.

The increase, it's almost non, it's essentially non-discretionary.

We're covering costs.

We get the minimum revenue, the lower revenue of any school that serves city residents, but we have the most extraordinary costs, and then but we are able to project that, and we are able to cover that in the minimum budget we're presenting.

And this is just another way of breaking it down.

Maintain staff, ensure that costs of special education are met, the health insurance are met, which is driven by staff, of course, and then some other costs such as supplies and utilities.

That's all of the increase for the New Bedford public schools.

And this is just another way to frame it.

You go back to that $314 million figure that the state is going to look for the city to demonstrate.

You have the New Bedford Public Schools budget, the charter schools, which are guaranteed always 100% of net school spending, they don't get cut.

You have the city assessments, which the school committee doesn't see, and then you have the school budget.

And of course, the big um a big item, which doesn't have any kind of chapter 70 or reimbursement, there are some smaller reimbursements, which we can talk about.

Interestingly, vocational, regional vocational transportation is reimbursed.

Um buses going to VOC or budgeted there, our reimbursed.

S programs that reimburse some portions of it.

The New Bedford School Committee budget for transportation actually serves Alma del Mar, parochial, our sisters school, and it serves students on IEPs.

We are fortunate that we have city or regional companies like Reliable Bus, like Tremble, and Whaling City Bus because they have far lower rates than the big corporations that serve places like Worcester, Boston, etc.

So they are lower per day rates, about 450, which is very low.

You go to Plymouth, you're into like five, six hundred with those bigger companies.

So these are competitive rates, these are local companies who who uh do a great job.

It's as simple as when when we need something, you call up Margarita, and we can make modifications with reliable, those kinds of things.

So these contracts are very important, they are very competitive, but IEPs can drive transportation eligibility, and that's a three million dollar increase for next year.

So this is overall the budget at the school committee approved.

The school committee takes three votes, net school spending, non-net school spending, and an overall budget, and did that May 11th following discussion, a projection at the February meeting and the March meeting, a discussion at the April and May meeting, and then a vote in the session after and the formal public hearing on May 11th.

Um just other ways to break it down in the book.

Again, most of our spending, where does our spending go?

Most of it goes on our staffing.

The bulk of our staffing is educators and support staff in buildings.

So this was a vote on the 11th.

Um the 13th, um, although we were sent this, this agenda was posted on the 11th, just before the school committee meeting, and we were able to verify these figures, um, the two million dollar difference in the transportation and um two and a half million or so on the city budget.

So we do have that four and a half million dollar difference right now in what's proposed for the city and what the school committee has voted to meet those costs and obligations at a minimum legal level for next year.

And I really encourage folks to check out the budget book.

You can just Google it.

You don't even have to go to the website, Google, New Bedford Public Schools budget book.

You land on this page, they're all there going back.

Now you know we don't encourage the use of Chat GPT per se.

But you could download the PDFs, throw them into Chat GPT and say, show me how many F how many school-based FTEs.

Show me how many counselors have increased at New Bedford High School over the past 10 years or so.

You could do that.

I may have done that.

But the point being that the FTEs are listed going all the way back 10 years.

You can actually see where the budget growth has gone.

It's gone into staffing our schools with that staff.

DESI does a good job because they have to do it for 300 plus towns, it takes it's always like a year out.

So you'll see FY24, where does the money go?

That's a big question.

You'll see that New Bedford spends about half the administrative cost of the state average or even lower.

You can see that it's actually been going down.

You can see that the money spent on teachers has been going up.

You can get all these reports and it's a pretty cool tool.

Just before I came down, actually, um DESI did send an email that the FY25 data is going to be updated.

So I would encourage folks to go look at this.

That said, in some cases, things like administration look higher here than they do in the budget book because if the city assesses the school department says we are assessing you for $2 million in administrative costs, they're allowed to do that under Mass General Law.

It's not a cost that goes into our classrooms or the school committee overseas.

So actually, things certain things are inflated, but it's a great place to start, and it's a great place to make comparisons.

And this is a sample of the report.

So I just want to end because while we're talking about accounting, and we're going to continue to have these meetings with our PTOs and others, so they can break down an understanding of the budget in these categories.

I do want to talk about where the money is really going.

And we often talk about return on investment and where is this investment going?

It's the most important investment that the city of New Bedford makes, or any city or town makes in serving our young people, but it also should have an impact and on our young people.

So we do have a strategic plan that talks about igniting learning, empowering our educators, uniting the community, and navigating the future of which budget planning is a part.

And we are seeing success.

There's a lot of talk about recovery from the pandemic.

But when we spend or invest or provide contracts to educators, many of whom are providing high quality AP courses, you can see the graduation rate.

This is the historically large cohort of graduates at a historic percentage.

And we do hear this all the time, we've heard this for 20 years.

Have standards been lowered?

This is College Board AP, national standard, high quality number of students in AP courses is increasing.

So by supporting our educators and supporting our schools, we are seeing improvement in academic outcomes.

Preschool is a real success story.

New Bedford School Committee, essentially, as we said at school committee last time, is the largest funder of preschool in the region.

Charter schools, others don't fund preschool, New Bedford public schools does, and we've been able to partner with local preschool providers, so it's seamless.

It's seamless in the city.

If you have a child with developmental delays and disabilities, they get assessed, they go to the right place, there's uniformity across, and so now we're serving more students in more appropriate environments, including at the Parker School.

That's a key investment that we're making and that's paying off.

This just came out this week.

Um you go to the it's the news site is called the 74 million.

There's 74 million K-12 students in the United States.

This is the key, this is the leading educational blog essentially.

They're highlighting who is beating the odds in early literacy.

Who is beating the odds in early literacy?

You'll see down a little gold star down on the peninsula.

Um that's the Taylor School.

This is the Brooks School, and all of our schools, some of them were down here last year, they're moving up here.

Our investments in early literacy are paying off.

We are beating the odds and getting national recognition.

The arts, the school committee has invested in the arts, it's reworked schedules or hiring.

Who are those teachers?

We're hiring more teachers or hiring more arts teachers, more music teachers, more physical education teachers.

New Bedford is providing more music, and this is out of date data.

We're going to be on the top of all these chapters.

We're providing more music and arts and fine arts because we know that's a true truly rounded education.

More students will be going to college from New Bedford High School than ever before.

Why?

Because we've invested in counselors.

This is what I was talking about earlier.

The guidance staffing at New Bedford High School has more than doubled.

And we're in we have integrated support systems for students to go to college.

That's growing.

The grad as the graduation rate grows, students are more students are going to college, and that gets into a virtuous cycle.

So we're really excited to see the college going numbers that will come.

My prediction is it will be record setting.

We can talk a lot, as you know, I can talk a lot about facilities, but we've invested in facilities.

The MSBA released a survey dashboard last week.

I encourage you to check it out.

Google again, MSBA survey, and you will see that over the past ten years, New Bedford public schools, in tandem with the commitment of the city council for that match has been improving its facilities more than any other district.

Now the other thing was we had to, right?

We had the oldest stock of buildings.

The trouble with buildings also is that they don't get any younger.

They are going to continue to need upkeep.

So after DeVaul, we've got Ashley, and then we do have, you will see on the dashboard, New Bedford High School is quickly becoming one of the older um high schools and it's slipping into that substandard level.

I I'll let you check out the MSBA dashboard, but just know that facilities are something we take very seriously and those investments are paying off.

Um just real quick, the New Bedford public schools are unique in the city in how much it commits to services throughout the year.

It is our obligation to basically find and assess disabilities in three or four year olds.

No other district does that.

That's in our budget to be able to go out and find students.

It's called child find.

We assess those students for developmental disabilities delays, and then we give them a preschool slot.

Um we're enrolling in preschool over the summer in kindergarten.

We're offering we're using the new pool to offer um swim lessons.

We will be providing summer programs.

So I say all this to demonstrate that you have a minimum funded district that is offering all of these services in a stable budget for this year and next year.

Um and that's it.

Um so overall, um, this is the discussion we want to have with our partners over the next um few weeks.

And as always, we stand ready to um answer any questions over the next few weeks and any questions tonight and get back to the council um uh with the answers.

Council Burgle.

Thank you.

Thank you, Superintendent O'Leary, for being here tonight and bringing your presentation ahead of time.

Um I guess the first question I'll address is if the administration doesn't come forward with a supplemental appropriation for the non-net school spending uh transportation side.

Um is there a plan in place to address uh potential deficits when it comes to transportation costs?

Yeah, I think at best we're about ten days out from that information.

So I I think there's always we we're always eager um to review things and we can review one saving grace that public school districts have because they serve um uh essentially all of the more severe um needs of students on IEPs is the circuit breaker program.

And you may have heard that in legislative discussions, and it's so important, it's a wonderful program that Massachusetts invests in.

So we could look there.

So we would look at that, but there's no straight reduction that works because we have very tiered transportation.

So because we have those local companies, they're fantastic to say, hey, can you add the OSS run, our sister school here, and the Alma run there?

So if you cut, you're cutting very, very deep.

So it doesn't just follow that you can drop a couple buses.

So it is gonna be complicated, and we haven't time.

We haven't had time to look at it since we got that information.

Okay.

Um the other concern I had, uh, well, I guess not concern, but I guess just question.

Um you had mentioned obviously um investments, obviously, in teaching in uh paraprofessionals.

I do see significant increases in paraprofessionals, but I did note that there were some decreases in the teaching uh numbers in some of the schools.

But I did also notice, oddly enough, that our student enrollment in some of the schools has decreased, which I thought was odd.

I don't know if that's a trend that we're seeing is the Yeah, I think that's that's a huge trend around a state.

Yeah, I think that that's a huge trend around a state.

That's been uh one of the major causes of all the budget crises around the state.

And you know, does that science of demographics, but I would say every district needs to model what it's gonna look like if we had 500 students left.

The only two districts that increased enrollment were Taunton and Fall River.

And you know, you um this body knows all about housing and things like that.

So enrollment is you've nailed it exactly.

So the small decrease in the teaching staff is essentially um because of the small decrease in enrollment.

Okay, so we're not gonna be concerned about classroom size uh sizes halfway through the year.

No.

No, we're we're in a we're in the best place we've ever been in terms of classroom size.

Um and that's what we what we commit to keeping.

Okay.

Just because I know in the past we have talked about occasionally halfway through the school year we do see a slight increase in some student enrollment.

The only school I'll highlight um that didn't seem to have that much of a uh dec uh change was Carlos Pachico from last year to this year.

Um the student enrollment seemed to stay the same, uh, but they there was a reduction about of about three teachers.

So that was my only concern.

Um that was uh one of the schools that I wanted to highlight to make sure that we weren't in a situation where we're overcrowding classrooms or anything like that.

Absolutely.

Yeah, and I can we can um break that down um and show show that as a follow-up.

I appreciate that.

Um and then looking at other departments that had uh reductions um on page 56 of our book for educational access and pathways.

I was just I wanted to make sure um some of the changes that were made there, especially because I think this department had plays such a significant role for our English language learners.

Um I know obviously one of the C DAM positions, I'm assuming the world language one was removed.

Yeah, and those were pushed out to schools.

One thing we've done over the past few years is um essentially take folks take folks from County Street and put them out in the schools because and and that's been a huge success.

So if you think about um English learner strategies or multilingual learner strategies, it's almost like you you build it in the lab and then you bring it to the field.

And that was the case with college access as well.

Um that team had been at County Street when they were first hired, and now they're out working with the counselors and others at the high school.

That's an example there.

The other example is early childhood.

Um but it um we've broken early childhood into its own um role um as the preschool has grown with success.

But I can break that out because that on paper, you're right, it does look like a big difference.

Okay, good because I was gonna say one of the significant ones here was the the teach the lead teacher and coach position re was reduced by six.

So that's so but you're saying that potentially what could have happened was those teachers.

Those folks are out in the field.

Okay.

Uh just wanted to make sure because that to me was like, whoa, what's happening with the teachers have in that?

Um next we have um I and I could have sworn you went over this in a previous budget hearing, and forgive me if I forgot, on page 60 for the fine arts department.

Similar to that, I'm assuming you're gonna give me the same answer you just gave me, district wide teachers, that was completely wiped out, the 3.25 FTEs for teachers.

I'm assuming that that was just placed into the city.

And that's good news because now uh the schools have those teachers have more of those teachers.

All right.

I just wanted to.

But that would be worth it.

Because I I see teachers and it goes zero, and I'm like, okay, what happened to our teachers there?

So I just wanted to clarify that.

Okay.

And then lastly here for page 63, um, Office of School Performance.

I wanted clarification on the C Dam positions there, uh curriculum data and assessment manager for those at home.

Um the increase of three, are these new curriculum, or is it is that the one where it was uh position I think it was like health.

Yeah, health.

So we we had budgeted last year um for health, and we had held off on filling that um until we we had uh qualified candidate, and then we also have phys ed, and we also have um talked about the literacy work and additional um language arts person there also, which is part um and and math, although the some of that is broken down because of the literacy work we were able to obtain um uh multi-million dollar grant, we're just carrying that.

So I I can break that out um in the follow-up also as to which C DAMs are on the new literacy grant and um the health phys ed and math.

Perfect.

Thank you so much.

That's all thank you.

Council Abrew.

Thank you, uh Mr.

President.

Good evening, Superintendent, and uh good to see you again.

Like always, a fantastic presentation.

You explained things very well, and um I'm not surprised.

I expected no less.

Um just looking you know through your presentation and looking through the book, just some questions about grants and um fiscal cliff concerns, maybe I would have, or maybe a taxpayer would have.

Um I know that this budget does include um some substantial grant funding and special revenue funds.

Um, and I'm sure you always have a plan in place.

I know you and your team and the school committee does, but what contingency uh planning has been done to prepare for heaven forbid any future State or Federal funding reductions given the volatility in Washington on Beacon Hill, et cetera?

Yeah, that's that's very important.

I think um we we've been seeing that.

It's some of the interesting quirks of the Federal budgeting process is the Federal Administration proposed a lot of cuts, then Congress restored them, but they're unlikely to grow.

So when some when a grant doesn't grow and the personnel costs and other costs grow, it's essentially a cut.

So I think we are going to have a significant challenge in the largest grant, Title I, the 21st century grant, which funds after school, we're gonna have that challenge for fiscal year 28.

So there are strategies we can take now.

You can carry over up to 15 percent.

So if it's an 85 percent offering in 28, you're you're made whole.

So we definitely want to look at our carryover.

That's something that's a feature of our reports in front of school committee twice a month.

You can see how much is carried over and you can balance that.

But you're definitely pointing to a concern that could really hit ourselves and other districts in fiscal year twenty eight.

Do other similar superintendents who um oversee analogous districts like you do, like in Fall River, the Broctons, the Lawrence, the Lowells, the Tauntons are they do they have the same concerns you do about this?

I'm sure you have a network and you all see that.

Yeah, the Commissioner actually Commissioner of Education met with a bunch of superintendents back in March and said a budget at 85 85 percent.

Um so that's what folks were doing, but the good news came through, but uh it's not going to grow for next year.

So it's going to be the same in the big cities for those programs, especially if you do hear Title I getting cut, that's the big one.

And then 21st century is a great program for after school programs also.

Okay, great.

And you pretty much explained everything else for the most part, but I just had one more question right now and may think of something else um later.

But um the budget here references projects anticipated for completion in fiscal year twenty-seven.

Um, which projects are fully funded and which may um which of those may require uh future borrowing or city support um can you show me the page?

Just so I'm reading from all.

I had it in my notes, so I have to look through the page now.

Uh hold on.

I had it written down on my notepad here on my phone and oh, 20 page 25.

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah, those um so the roof, the roof projects are underway this summer.

Uh and we had a very favorable bid opening on that well within the budget.

Yep.

Um so those are well within the budget, and those are established in the PFAs have been signed, and this body has approved all of that.

So the roof replacements and all of all of these actually and of course the con the highlight is the Congrat of all school, which will open in January.

So the city has made a sizable commitment to these and then is able to exploit the anywhere from 60 to 75 percent match from the MSBA.

Ashley Swift um has a long ways to go, right?

I mean that's in feasibility, um, but that's exciting also.

But the others um are well within the the funding and and execution stage.

Okay.

I think that's all I have right now.

Um if I uh need a second, well not really a second, it's not so formal, but uh if I do want the floor again, I'll ask for it, Mr.

President.

Thank you.

Thank you, Andy.

Great work as always.

Thank you, Mr.

President.

I'll yield.

Thank you.

Counselor Pemberton.

Thank you, Mr.

President.

Uh thank you, Mr.

Superintendent Leary for being here.

Uh just a quick question.

I noticed that the there's going to be an increase in the uh crossing guards.

Uh so currently, how many schools do we have?

How many schools do we have across the guides at?

Oh, wow.

Um that's a good one.

I don't have it in front of me.

I pass two every day, but um I'm gonna have to get back to you on that.

I don't want to speculate.

We have increased, and they're they're worth their weight in gold or crossing guards.

I I'll get back to you on that.

So in how many school how many per school do you do?

Oh well it it depends.

It depends.

So we tend to have two at Kearney, and a lot of time it's a local recruitment.

I'm sorry, two at Pulaski.

A lot of times it's a local recruitment.

We we tend to have two um at Lincoln, um, one at Kearney, um that kind of um one at Jacobs.

And again, it's really important because it's not an all-day commitment, so we're relying on folks to come out for that short time.

Correct.

So my other question then is so how many in-house security guards do you have?

So the security teams are at the middle and high school.

Um and so I I'll have to get you the number on that, but it it's somewhere in the region of at each middle school around four, and then um uh multiples of that at the at the high school.

We've grown that role over the past few years.

Right.

So there's more uh crossing guides and our security personal in-house as well.

No?

No.

No, there's more there would be more security FTEs in but they're in building and there are crossing and the crossing guards is a small shift in the AM and MPM, I would say.

All right.

So the we we wouldn't be able to have the in-house doing any crossing guards work?

No.

I I don't think that's logistically works.

I think um in terms of student student arrival in building and then the work they do um supporting the school teams in building at the secondary level, it's a little different than the crossing guard role.

Right.

All right.

Thank you.

That's all I have for now.

And I I will get you those numbers.

All right, I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor.

Councillor Roy.

Thank you, Mr.

President.

Thanks, Mr.

President.

Hi, Superintendent O'Leary.

Um since the part of the part of the cuts um well part of the difference between what the mayor presented um uh of the school budget to us in in in the school budget that the school committee passed was transportation.

You said it was cut two and a half million.

I heard you mentioned something before about um Alama buses and and and OSS buses.

Can you can you explain the relationship b again um between transportation costs and other schools in New Bedford that are not part of the district?

Sure.

Thanks.

So technically um the city the city has an obligation uh by mass general law to bus students who have transportation in their IEP and also to bus students outside two miles.

The school committee, um and this is the case with many school committees, has the policy uh tiered policy of one and a half mile for certain grades and two miles.

So then that policy, if it's the policy of the school committee, has to apply to every other student.

Now charter schools, of course, are not neighborhood schools.

So you have a scenario where you could be busing a student from Park Street um to the Alma school or the global school versus that student is ineligible um at Park Street.

So it's it's basically a city obligation.

Um that is truly unfunded, and it's it is an inequitable burden on the City of New Bedford that regional school districts and rural school districts get more reimbursement than a city school, so hopefully over the coming years that will change.

But it's not it it applies to every student.

So actually our sister school that reached out to us, and technically legally that was correct that that we needed to assist them with transportation, we were able to work that out.

So it's just it's generally the law that applies to every resident child, including those on IEPs.

Thank you.

Any other questions for Superintendent O'Leary?

Council Carney?

Yeah, I don't have a question, just a comment.

Um the proposal that you gave us that you had on uh the smart board, there's a few pages of of the chats that you can't even read.

I can't read them.

So if can I just contact you and absolutely I'll just contact you and give you page numbers and you can I'll send this also um and we'll post that on on our website.

But please um we I um please reach out directly and we can send that to you.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Thank you.

Uh Superintendent President.

Thank you.

Uh super uh any other questions for Superintendent O'Leary.

Okay.

Just from the Chair.

Uh piggybacking off of uh previous uh colleagues question.

I I I see you're doing a lot of projections.

I think you uh alluded to next year's budget as well.

And you were cons you had some concerns about 28's budget with some um of that.

What else are the uh are you seeing uh because I know we've been very I think very well uh uh assisted with Chapter 70 funds with the Student Opportunity Act, but uh is that keeping up with the costs?

You you basically I think in your presentation stated that at the end of the day the increase in our costs uh basically have kept up with our uh uh uh needs.

Revenues.

Yeah, revenue, yeah.

Yeah.

So my question is do we see that trend continuing?

Because what we don't want is on that graph you had showed, I think in the earlier slide, that wavy uncertainty in and making sure we're able to fund appropriately.

Yeah, I think that's that's crucial.

And I think that's all the more reason we want to lock in this budget and then it becomes um the responsibility of the school committee twice per month to review it.

But we are going to start earlier than ever, because you're absolutely right, and Councillor Abreu is absolutely right, that FY28 with demographics, one of the things we've talked to Mr.

Flynn and our team about is let's model.

Let's model if if 500 if we have a 500 student decline.

If we submit data in October 1, which is the enrollment date, we submit, and it's 500 students less.

That could be the case.

That's what happened to Framingham and Chelsea.

And then the state isn't going to fund students who aren't here.

Um there is a small hold harmless, but that's not going to help us.

So why don't we model that now?

Model what class size would look like, and then we have time during the year to modify our hiring so we don't overextend ourselves.

So that's one plan we have because I do think enrollment is going to continue to decline.

The there's no sign.

I think the hostility uh to immigrant communities, uh, the inability to get housing development moving forward, that's inherently going to affect enrollment.

Um and that's exactly what's happening to other communities in the state.

Now building off of that though, the there's gonna be a certain point that there is a uh uh uh uh the large number of students allows us to be able to have a little bit from every student, so to speak, to be able to afford things like fine arts and extracurricular activities or after school programming.

And there's a point when because of the lack of volume that that we have to claw back on that for every student.

And there's a change, correct?

No, because uh that wouldn't that doesn't happen because we are state funded, um essentially, substantially state funded, um, 85 percent.

And again, as I said, much of the match is not demonstrable revenue that the school committee applies.

So essentially the school committee applies um almost all of state funding.

So state funding is on enrollment, so that's going to going to drop.

So your revenue is just going to drop.

And so there's no efficiencies there, um, or there's not going to be any revenue left to have that flex or or better class sizes or things like that in a sustainable way.

No, I I was saying the opposite.

I don't know if I said it right.

Okay.

If with a large enrollment drop and a large revenue drop because it's proportional, but at some point that adversely affects the district.

Absolutely.

Right.

That's what I was trying to say.

Yeah, yeah.

No, absolutely.

That's okay.

And that's we've got to be very, very ready for that because that's what's happening uh to our districts.

Brockton, et cetera.

Yeah.

Okay, exactly.

That's what I thought.

Thank you.

Any other questions, colleagues?

Great.

Superintender O'Leary, uh, thank you very much um for your uh presentation.

Do you want to introduce folks that are here?

Yeah, we have um our our outstanding deputy superintendent Darcy Young's, um North End resident, um, vice chair, Melissa Costa, um Melissa Texera, who we're very lucky to have on our finance team.

Um Mr.

LeBlanc, who's an outstanding STEM teacher from New Bedford High School, Dr.

Michael Hall, who is the principal of the DeVaul School and incoming principal of the Ashley School, um Mr.

Markey, who I think members of this body know from school committee, um Alec um Alex Pella um who's uh a neighbor and resident of Hathaway School as well as the principal of Hathaway School, Kim Marshall, who I'm sure many folks in this building know also from Haymac and Mr.

Chris Cotter, also from school committee and our ASME president, Mr.

Mello, and unit A president, Mr.

Nickerson.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, uh Superintendent uh O'Leary.

I appreciate uh you being here, your time.

Uh thank you, Bob uh extra mark city CFO, Shavon Thomas, whose title is basically everything else.

Um I thank them and thank you, colleagues.

Thank you, everybody.

And thanks, Sue uh for uh running uh uh the cable up there.

All right, have a good night.

We're adjourned at 807.