The Peabody Finance Committee, sitting as the Committee of the Whole, met on May 7, 2026, to receive a budget update from the Mayor. No agenda or minutes were available for this meeting; this summary is based on the raw transcript. The Mayor was joined by Finance Director Mike Jingris and City Auditor Mary Martin, and the only agenda item was the budget update and related revenue proposals.
Good evening. Going to call to order the finance committee meeting, sitting as a committee of the whole of May 7th. The only item on our agenda this evening is an update on the budget. From that I will turn it over to His Honor the Mayor. Thank you, Madam Chair. Good evening to you. Good evening, Counselors. Hope everybody's doing well. I just wanted to continue our discussion from several weeks ago when we first met to start talking a little bit about the budget. I wanted to provide some additional information, kind of go through some of our work that we've been doing over the last few weeks uh to prepare the budget and uh certainly available to answer any questions. I'm joined today by our finance director, Mike Jingris and our city auditor Mary Martin, and certainly they're available for any questions as well. Um I figured I'd just go through a number of items. Um, Madam Chair, and and then at the end answer questions, or we can break it down into each individual part. But I kind of thought maybe I can just go through a whole bunch of things and then open it up. Is that okay? Yeah, I think that works, thank you. Great. So just in terms of a budget overview, I think all of you know um we've been working with our individual department heads to to look at first uh personnel and then expenses. Uh the expenses just like everybody's household expenses at home, uh heat, gas, water, things of that nature. Uh we've been looking at each budget line item, trying to see where there can be potential savings. Uh we've taken a real hard critical look at um positions um and uh where potential savings where it makes sense. Um the budget is primarily people. Uh I speak to that quite a bit. That um seventy to seventy-five percent of the budget is people. Um people providing top notch services to the residents uh in a variety of different departments. Um, but between salaries and health insurance, uh that's the the bulk of any budget uh for any city or town. Uh then it gets into those other items outside services and um from there. But it's primarily any budget is primarily people driven. Uh so uh I am going to be presenting to you um a budget that has reductions in personnel. Um I'll be presenting I don't have a number just yet. We're fine-tuning it. Uh, but without question, there'll be a budget presented that has less people working uh budgeted positions than the year before. But our budget drivers, I think all of you know, health insurance. I don't want to be a uh broken record, but eleven point one percent increase over last year is significant. Uh Essex Tech is over one point two five million over last year, eighteen percent, the largest increase that has ever occurred uh from Essex Tech is happening this year, eighteen percent. Uh cost of living adjustments which were negotiated through union uh bargaining. Uh that is something that I do have some control over, and I've always been very open that I felt that people that work in the city uh deserve a cost of living adjustment. Um as well as retirement went up over six hundred thousand dollars this year. Uh the trash fee because now we are operating under prevailing wage. Uh there was a significant increase in prevailing wage uh that had as a over six hundred thousand dollar impact on our budget. Uh and then our liability insurance um went up. And liability insurance, just to give a little bit of detail to that. It's like everybody has their homeownership insurance, car insurance. Uh we have insurance on all of our vehicles, our whole fleet of vehicles in every department, all of our buildings, all of our grounds. Uh, we have professional liability insurance as well as cybersecurity insurance. So all of that is under the umbrella of insurance, and uh that went up uh this year, uh well over a hundred thousand dollars. So those are the big budget drivers. Um, and I've said this before with my whiteboard, and I'll be doing that again during the presentation. Before we even look at the budget, uh we factor in those items, those increases, and this year, just between those items, that would potentially be a four hundred dollar increase, over four hundred dollars. And then we start getting into the budget and seeing where we can reduce and tighten things up, and that's what we've been working on now.