Tracking energy
As if things weren’t bad enough in the fiscal year 2009 budget picture, it appears that the town’s energy-conservation efforts are not yet what they should be. At the Finance Committee’s Jan. 7 meeting, member Lori Granville reported that the heat is still excessive at Bromfield School, even hours after the school day has ended. It’s warmer in the school at 6 p.m. than it is in her house, Granville said, and she wondered why the situation can’t be remedied. School board Chairman Stu Sklar, who attended the meeting, responded that school Facilities Manager Mark Force is continuing to work on the problem, which has been a concern for years. Finance Committee Chairman George McKenna remarked that the Bromfield heating system was “poorly manufactured” and “doesn’t allow room for a lot of tweaking.”
Still on the subject of energy, the committee learned from Finance Director Lorraine Leonard that electricity use at the library is up this year, and nobody seems to know why. The lights and computers are shut down at night, member Terry Mead said, and her colleagues agreed that the town’s energy committee should look into it.
Dispatch, DPW could be regional
The idea of joining forces with other towns for public works and emergency dispatch services is gaining ground. The town is already engaged in discussions about regionalizing its Department of Public Works with Ayer and Devens as a way to save money, and this week the subject of emergency communications landed firmly on the table.
“The only reasonable solution is regionalizing dispatch,” said Finance Committee Chairman George McKenna after scouring the proposed fiscal year 2010 police and communications budgets for possible savings. “I don’t see any other way.”
McKenna’s remarks came at a Saturday morning, Jan. 10, Finance Committee meeting convened to start work on the fiscal year 2010 Omnibus Budget. The police and communications budgets are particularly problematic because there’s little to cut without compromising public safety. The town has only three options in regard to communications in the next several years, said board member Bob Thurston: “Regionalize, pay more taxes, or cut something else out entirely.”
Town Administrator Tim Bragan agreed, but pointed out that towns don’t like the idea of losing control of their communications service, or of any other service, for that matter. “People have to see that it works,” Bragan said, adding that regionalizing services is the only way to save money, “not only for us but for the other communities, too.”
The two regionalization options would be to either “sell our services to another town or contract out communications,” Thurston said. “We’d want to see who has the best facility.”
Searching for sustainable budget cuts
Looking over proposed departmental budgets for fiscal 2010, one thing became clear to the Finance Committee last week: none of the proposed spending cuts is sustainable. The town clerk was able to get by without an increase because she had extra money in the fiscal 2009 budget for elections. The police chief is holding the line in part by offering to forgo a new cruiser next year. But unless there are no more elections in coming years, or the existing police cruisers last forever, these cuts are only temporary fixes.
In preparing proposed budgets for fiscal 2010, department heads were instructed to limit pay raises to 2 percent and to absorb any expected cost increases, including health insurance costs, within the confines of fiscal 2009 spending levels. For the most part, the only way to do that was to cut expense budgets to accommodate personnel costs.
Trying to tackle that problem, Finance Committee members last Saturday came up with a couple of useful, if modest, suggestions. The first would be to reduce cleaning costs by hiring a custodian, like the school custodians, who would clean the library and the Public Safety Building. Currently, the two buildings are cleaned by the same contractor, which charges more than the cost of a custodian.
Another cost-saving suggestion was to encourage library personnel to fix clogged toilets by using a plunger, just as they would at home. This idea surfaced after board member Terry Mead revealed that library staff members generally call a plumber whenever a toilet gets clogged. And still on the subject of the library, Finance Director Lorraine Leonard reported that the library could save on bottled water costs by buying bigger bottles.
“They pay three times as much for half the water,” she said.
All of this and more will be on the agenda when the finance board meets with the various department heads.
Transfer station sticker changes
The process of getting a transfer station sticker might be in for some changes. Finance Director Lorraine Leonard is proposing that townspeople no longer receive customized notices when new stickers are due, and that they no longer get two stickers for one price. Instead, a general notice would be sent informing the public when new stickers are ready for purchase and each sticker would be issued individually. This would presumably curtail the practice of obtaining two stickers and giving one to a neighbor, which Leonard says is not uncommon, and might also increase revenue while trimming costs.
Another cost-cutting possibility is a pay-per-bag program of trash disposal, which the town came close to adopting some years ago. Leonard is convinced “it’s the way to go,” she said, in that it reduces costs by encouraging recycling. Under pay-per-bag, townspeople would pay for each bag of trash they put in the compactors, so they would be more likely to recycle, which costs nothing for residents. Such a program is also considered more equitable in that the more trash a person discards, the more they pay. Under the sticker system now in place, the cost is the same whether one bag or a truckload is discarded.
The old library
In this cost-cutting time, it’s getting hard to justify the cost of heating the old library. “We might have to shutter it” to save $8,000 to $11,000 in annual costs, Town Administrator Tim Bragan told the Finance Committee on Saturday. At their next meeting, the selectmen are expected to take up the question of fees for use of the building, Bragan said, adding that the options boil down to “limited use or no use.” Asked if the town could rent or sell the old library, Bragan said the lack of a separate septic system precludes a sale, and that renting would be questionable.
Town Report online
For the first time this year, Harvard’s Annual Town Report will be available in print for a fee and online for free. And to save further costs, the Annual Town Meeting Warrant and Finance Committee Report will be published on newsprint. The town report, a prize-winner in past years, will be a shadow of its former self, without pictures, Town Administrator Tim Bragan told the Finance Committee. Chairman George McKenna remarked wryly that he had suggested the online option in previous years, without success.
