Good evening everyone.

It is 631 on Wednesday, June 24th, calling Committee on Finance to Order.

Note this meeting is being live streamed and recorded.

The City Council Committee meetings can be viewed on the City New Brefort's homepage under quick links, then meetings.

In attendance, we have Council of Ward 2, Scott Pemberton, Councilor Ward 1, Leo Shouquette, Council President and 6 City Council Ryan Pereira, Counter at Lodge, James Roy, Councilor Ward 3, Sean Oliver, and myself, Joseph Lopes, Chairman of Finance, and the Ward 5 City Councillor.

We do have one letter to be read into the record.

This letters from Councillor Baptiste.

I am writing to inform you that I've been able to attend tonight's committee meeting due to a family commitment.

Please read this letter into the record to make my colleagues in the public aware of the reason for my absence.

Made by Council Oliver, second by Council Pemberton.

All those in favor, opposed, the ayes have it.

We have one item in front of us.

Um first Vice President, Councilor at Large, Shane Burgo is also in attendance.

The podium is yours.

If one of you would Jan, would you like to give an overview of the uh good evening?

So we are here again to talk about the budget for the community preservation committee.

I think you've all received it, so we're presenting a budget of 1 million 999, 887.

And it's based on surcharge revenue of one that 1,743, 165.

A match of a proposed match, we don't know what it will be exactly, but 256, 72.

And we also have all the expenses.

I can read those.

Program administration, which is five percent, 99,995.

Open space and recreation reserve, 199,989,000.

Community housing reserve, one ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine dollars, and budgeted reserve of one million two hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred twenty-five dollars.

So I guess if you have any questions.

Are we getting more money?

Is it been fairly stagnant?

It's it depends.

It's based on the transfer taxes that happen within the st uh state.

So as we if real estate sells less, there's at least less real estate sold, we'll get less of a match.

I see.

I think the high was twenty-three.

Okay.

Yeah, it it's just i it's too bad there wasn't another way to try and infuse some more funds into this because uh, you know, the contributions the taxpayers of this city have made towards community preservation is is uh amazing for the the preservation projects that we work on.

And I can only imagine if we had a little bit more support from our state uh uh partners how much more we could do with that those funds and funds that directly go into this community, right?

Like that's this very little in between from uh uh appropriation when we see you guys and it goes directly into the the city.

With that being said, the spread across the board in with our neighboring communities that have a that have um the community preservation act and in their community enacted in their communities.

Is it divvyed a amongst all the towns equally?

Is it based up is it a percentage of what we bring in?

How is it how do we know which how much we're gonna get from the state?

Like I know it's a a pot that we get divided up, but how does it get divided up?

I think it's just yeah, but I mean I would imagine it's mostly just percentage.

Uh right now there are 201 communities that get community preservation commission money, and every year more communities come on board.

So it's going to change every year.

There's 351 communities in new in uh the state of Massachusetts.

Right now, that's like 200 out of the 351.

Yeah.

Um to expand upon that.

So some communities are at 1%, one or one and a half, like we are, some are upwards of three percent.

So that changes um the calculation because the the higher calculations get a second allotment.

Um to answer your question on the um how they determine the state matches based on the the previous year's fiscal year's local revenue.

So whatever we've um received uh or calculated and received on the surcharge, that 15.5 percent that we're receiving for fiscal year 26, they take last year's revenue times 15.

I think it's 15.5, sorry.

And then that's where you come up with the 256 uh 722.

So it and it depends on each community, like I said, depending on what their surcharge percentages.

Okay.

Yeah, that's something to monitor, especially to your point if more communities continue to join and and and need to to come out of this fund, we're we're not gonna have uh the money will get smaller because the percentage of uh of pot that's not growing, you know, will will will equate less dollars.

So I guess I would say that it took 14 years for us to do this.

Yeah.

And that before the 14 years we got nothing.