SAUGUS — The Finance Committee on Wednesday continued their annual budget review process, parsing budgets for town boards, committees, departments, and debt service payments for the coming fiscal year.
The committee was without Chair Kenneth DePatto Wednesday evening, leaving member Marc Magliozzi to run the meeting. The questions of committee members for Town Manager Scott Crabtree and Treasurer/Collector Wendy Hatch were primarily directed toward specific line-item increases in the budgets. Crabtree and Hatch frequently pointed to salary increases and other contractual obligations as reasons for the bumps.
One line item in particular — a $13,000 increase listed as “professional and technical shore education collaborative” — caught the committee’s attention. Hatch explained that line item was for spending on reimbursements for Medicaid students in the school department, and rose from $12,000 to $25,000 because of a projected increase in the number of students who qualify.
Crabtree pointed to that line item as a way in which the discussion around how the school budget is managed gets misconstrued, noting that the town incumbers Schedule 19 costs like health insurance on behalf of the schools.
“It’s another one of these fees that gets lost in the overall school budget that we’re still paying for on behalf of the school,” Magliozzi said.
“When you play on the same team, you don’t have to worry about that stuff,” Crabtree added.
Throughout the budget process, Crabtree has been uncharacteristically vocal about the way the school department’s budget is handled. He told the Board of Selectmen he was concerned that allocating more money than the $30.7 million he recommended to the schools could create a structural deficit in the town’s budget. He has stressed that any reductions made to the school budget throughout the process should not be seen as cuts. The reasoning behind that, he has said, is the department and School Committee approve only a proposal, not a final allocation.
On Wednesday, he doubled down on those comments.
Crabtree suggested that new superintendents and even some School Committee members will point to the increase in the town’s operating budget and the school’s operating budget and compare the two as a way of arguing the schools are underfunded.
“They’re not including all the expenses on the Schedule 19 that went up $1 million on top of what their operating budget is,” he said. “They get people riled up and the parents [don’t] understand what this means. It’s just not accurate.”
A former School Committee member, Magliozzi said he views the school’s operating budget as representing the cost of educating students, and the Schedule 19 expenses as the cost of housing the students within the schools.
Committee members also questioned Crabtree and Hatch on a $30,000 increase in the accounting department’s budget. They replied it was a result of shifting both procurement and benefits to accounting out of other departments. Cuts in the same amount were made to the human resources department to account for the change.
Hatch explained that increases in the department she oversees as treasurer/collector came in the costs of both processing payments and printing tax bills, with Crabtree recommending an additional $23,000 for her department over fiscal year 2023.
Crabtree also proposed allocating more funds to the town’s legal counseling services, explaining that he saw protecting the town from litigation as a big part of his role as town manager.
“There’s also a lot more development and different things going on within the town that necessitate more technical legal advice,” he said.
When the committee moved to the debt service payments, which total roughly $9.3 million for the coming fiscal year when interest is included, Magliozzi asked Hatch for a broader explanation of the payments.
“The debt service budget is driven by our existing debt schedules. Our debt is broken down into what is excludable from Proposition 2 ½ and not. So what is excludable from Proposition 2 ½ is added to the tax levy, it’s not limited by the propositional 2 ½ increase,” she said.
Crabtree explained that the payments added to the tax levy were authorized by the votes of Town Meeting and the residents writ large, and were put forward to fund specific capital expenditures like the construction of the new middle/high school complex.
Once those debts are paid off, they roll off the town’s balance sheet.
The committee is set to reconvene Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the first-floor conference room at Town Hall to review employee benefits and begin the process of reviewing the Annual Town Meeting Warrant.
