Tonight is the official start of our budget season. And to kick off, the time is now 617 PM. And tonight we will be reviewing, we are having a work session to review the town of Narragantz. It's fiscal year 2026 budget with staff to discuss the following budgets, information resources, community development, and boards and commissions. So I will happily pass the baton off to whoever wants to start off first. And thank you all for being here. Good evening and thank you, Council President Menzies and Council Members. I will start tonight with two, the first of our budget work sessions and the two departments of information technology and community development. I'll start by saying first off that the compensation, all salary and benefits is basically driven by the contracted, contract bargaining agreement and any percentages we get from Blue Cross and et cetera. There was one position that was, they each had in their budget for this current year within, which didn't get filled. So the town manager actually combined that into one position and that will be a GIS senior planner that will sit in community development. Other than that you can see from the IT and community development both the budgets went down almost 8% and basically that's due to staffing either turnover that happened a lot of community development or the joining of that one position, two positions into one. And now I'll turn it over to Dan. I do have a short PowerPoint presentation to go over some complicated numbers in IT. Should only take a second. IT is made up of, as we all know, four positions. One network and security administrator, two SIS admins, one at town hall, one at public safety. Public safety one is funded through the police budget. And myself director slash manager. As we all know the IT is responsible for everything IT related in the town which is everything we do now. Like 20 years 30 years ago that was not the case. Support cyber security, hardware support, software, project management for technology related items, users, AV support for Council Planning Board and Zoning Board, mobile device management for cell phones, tablets, MDTs, cameras, and basic asset inventory for everything that we use. Just to jump into the budget, as Chris has already said, the personnel benefits are set by finance, either through CVAs and or Blue Cross and various costs like that. That's 50101 through 50125 on my budget. The next set of budget line items for mine is the operating costs and most of which is level funded. That runs from 502.01, that one did have an adjustment from last year. That's the Internet Service Provider website and wireless costs for all departments. The wireless one is the new one that drove that cost up. That pulled all of our Verizon phones into one budget. Supplies, professional meetings, all-level funders from the previous year. Software, same telephone services was adjusted. That incorporates all of what was broken out by department for the voice over IP phone system into one. Makes it easier for us to budget, and as as pay for through accounting. Equipment repair and office equipment is all level fund from the previous years, that just for things that we need to repair within our own office. Total cost for 50311, I skipped over because that's the half a million dollar one. That incorporates I've got it broken down into several different topics. The first one is core systems and software or software and services I should say. First one, Tyler Munis is the enterprise resource planning and or financial system that we have. The revenue side of it which we're just finishing up in the presentation. Open Gov which is the platform for building permits licensing licensing in the clerk's office. Asset management and work order system that we have for maintaining our assets, what we have, what we, where it's located. And any work orders we have for public works. Microsoft 365 email and office finishes that up, which is also the bulk of that cost. Next one is cyber security related items, antivirus, email filtering, firewall support and updates, network monitoring, licensing, 2FA services that we all love, and the backup services for all of our systems. And the next one is listed as other includes voiceover phone system support, asset and inventory for IT related items, physical security system, IT tools that we use, zoom account if we need it and the Office 365 cloud backup. That next jumps into capital. Do you wanna do that now or do you wanna? Well, does anyone on the council have any questions so far? Going to the budget, I noticed that all the telephone fees were all taken out and zeroed out. So if you just explain that again, I know you mentioned, but I didn't know you just said. So it is a voiceover IP phone system and the idea was to combine it out from each department because it's the same amount, no matter what it is. And there true actual way of saying okay you have four phones so it's this amount. So it was easier just to take it, put it all into one budget area and make it far easier for our friends and accounting to pay for. So. Perfect, thank you. You're welcome. We tried to come up with a solution to break it out and we just. Yeah, no, no that's fine. And I just noticed everywhere it's a telephone service, it was zero and I was like, well, thank you. And security firewalls, those are all level funded. And we feel that the shape. They are, for the particular year, they did not go up, but they do tend to fluctuate a lot in some years, based upon, because we're at the mercy of the vendor for what the support contract is for that per year. So. OK. Yep. Thank you. Anyone else on the council? No. Okay. Please continue. Okay. Next is capital. First line item in capital, which I think is page. There it is. There's no page on around that. So that's what. Item number one for capital is the fiber optic cable maintenance. We keep a fund of money in there to repair our own 5-roft at cable we have on the streets. We don't pay Verizon or Cox to maintain it. We actually hit loan it ourselves. And every time it breaks, we have to have it repaired so we keep some money aside for it. I.T. No. 2 is the PC and server replacement program. I should remove that. That was cut. IT number three is IT equipment. That is for things that we are unexpected expenses or new items that we need to fund, depending on where technology is headed. IT number four is a physical security system replacement starting with town hall and public safety. We have a system that's been sitting here for about 25 years and need some updates and improvements So that's that's our capital budget And Dan this is just like door access stuff Yeah, physical security correct And this is just quick slide on things how we try to save money in IT. IT is usually a cost center that really doesn't produce its own money. So we tend to use PC hardware three to five years longer than interesty standard. Requires a lot of innovative use of older equipment retired, you reusing different pieces of it and cannibalizing for the future. Open source software where we can, alternative OSs where we can at no cost, recycling old equipment, and then we moved to virtual hardware many years ago which saves us hundreds of thousands of dollars every few years in replacing hardware. So we always try to find something new to save. Last few things we've also done is combining software, multiple systems that were with different vendors, bring them into one if we can, tends to have a savings to it as well. Do we ever sell off old product? We tend to e-waste it. By the time we get rid of it, it's nothing you want to use at home. So thank you. Can I just ask a question about the server? Sure. Since it was cut, how what condition is our server in? Our server infrastructure for virtual machines is actually brand new. Okay, one what condition is our servers are server in? Our server infrastructure for virtual machines is actually brand new. Okay. One of them is like two years old. The other ones a year old. So essentially it's new. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. And when we see cuts just for our education moving forward, when we see something that's cut, does that mean it was originally in like previous budgets and it's now being cut or was it originally something that you guys had proposed and now have since decided to cut? That's all of the above but for this year you'll see on the capital pages in your sheet you'll see where the town manager made a cut. So that usually that line that was caught is usually in his budget every year but he has some carry carryover from this last year and to this year. So he thinks there's enough funds that if something happens, there is still funding available. It's not any new money that's been caught by the town manager. It'll say it like on the bottom. Over here, it'll say town manager zero in department, 40,000. Oh, like she. Can I go back? Sorry, go ahead. Can I go back to the licenses? Sure. Do you just want a second? The 500,000 that's originally budgeted, looks like it only goes to about 400,000 every year. Is that true? Am I reading that right or am I reading that right? The 50311? 50311, yeah.. Yes So that has been fluctuating quite drastically over the last five years. Have you ever gotten up to the 500,000? Spending wise. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yep. So yeah, we're this year to actually drop because we changed We had a double funding for revenue software from last year Because we are in the middle of and software implementation So we cut that old one, that's why it's a drop this year. But it does fluctuate a bit even within, because we're in estimating numbers completely. And we actually take what I spent the previous year at 5% across the board, which we don't always spend. Okay, so what we don't spend rolls back into the next fiscal year for Chrisa to have. All right, cool, thank you very much. Sorry. Nope, that's okay. I do know, from the school committee side, I know that we were doing a lot of forward thinking, especially for the district technology committee. I was on there for two years. And we thought about always like the worst case scenarios and having a plan should the worst things happen like a hacking or a crash. Do we have a reconfit in with all the systems that we have in place that should any of those worst case scenarios happen? We do have a disaster recovery plan because those are disasters when it comes to those cyber incidents. In my confident what we have, yes, but we don't spend anywhere near enough money to give you 100% that no one could ever hack us. So also it's just so you know for the right yellow budget, which will be during the work sessions There's 600,000 in contingency funds that we keep in operating budgets, less than 1% of the total budget for instances and emergencies that we come across. Does that conclude your presentation? I just want to make sure that's okay. I'll actually open the focus. I'll just want to think for you real quick. Oh, yeah, no. I was I will go down the line. We can start on this side of the line. Councillor Tory, if you want to open up the floor. Can you talk through the access control system replacement project? Sure. We have access controls in several buildings. I don't want to go into detail in the public meeting like this. But the system was installed in the early 2000s. And it's a proprietary system that they chose at the time. It wasn't involved in it. And when we make changes to it, it's extremely expensive to work with. And not only is it that that the software is out of date, and the hardware is difficult to get in the cost the cost and not cost effective. So the idea is to replace it with something a little more open platform so we can use multiple different vendors in the same system, saving money, but there is a cost to get to that point. So, yeah. Okay. Is this only going to be implemented at town hall or does this go across police fire? It'll be multiple buildings. Okay. Yeah. Got it. All right. Thanks. Councillor Collin, do you have any questions? No. Thank you. Councillor Vignelli. So I'm looking at this. So for ongoing project for replacement desktops, laptops, there's zero in the budget, but this is a projection for the next what, six years? Six years, yep. To come down. So this year we didn't really need to do any of that. We had left over monies from the previous years in capital that we could use to offset that. Perfect, thank you. Yeah, worked out nicely. Nice, yeah. Excellent. I actually already asked my questions as I went through, so I really appreciate your taking the time, all of the amount of time and energy that went into putting this together and as being as informative as it has been for us. So thank you. You're very welcome. Thank you, dear. You're welcome. So feel free to go right into the next. Good evening, Jill Sabo, Director of Planning. My budget's a lot simpler than Mr. Hollins. Wow. I hope. So, I'm just going to go through a page turn with you. It's really the, the Department of Budget's pretty short. So you can see there's a couple of things. of things. I want to point out at the very beginning that it's actually a net decrease of 8%. So we are decreasing our budget. We have a couple of things where we've added in a little bit of increase on some of our online items. For instance, copy or agree bins and professional meetings. We have a pretty big large printer in our office that prints full-size plans. We don't have a service agreement for it right now and it's been on the Fritz for the last four months. So we have been holding off actually getting a service agreement until we can get that in the budget. And again, professional meetings, as I mentioned, and professional development. As previously mentioned, we do have another staff person who has been hired. We have a position, so we're anticipating with licenses, in dues, and development for that new person as well. We added just a little bit in both of those line items. And the last one I think was a PC software, So our licensing for Ezri went up this year. I'm sorry, Ezri. I should have told you what that is. Ezri is the computer software program for our GIS. Thank you. Oh, yeah. I will. OK. So the one thing I don't have in the budget because the irony is budget season starts in the fall and grant season starts in the spring is that we have the opportunity right now to apply for a grant from SNEP, which SNEP is the Southeast New England program, and that's a program of the EPA. And they're the grant this year. It's a SWIG grant, which is a watershed implementation grant. It's a grant we've applied for a couple of times in the past. And it's specifically for the following farm causeway project. I'm not sure if you folks are familiar. We have an ongoing project. It's been a project here in the town since in one shape or form or another since 2017. There is an opportunity right now to apply for money to look at the second component of that project. The first component is the road raising, which is happening right now through FEMA grant. And we're looking at the second prong of that would be the water quality component of the way that if you're familiar with where a flattering farm cause is it separates two coves, long coven, Champlain cove, and again, environmentally long cove is unhealthy. And the actually the folks on the island as well as Salt Pong Coalition approached us in 2017 about how to make the access and egress safer because the road does flood and has been closed before it was closed in Superstorm Sandy. And also if there was a way to dovetail that with making the coves more vibrant and healthier by potentially putting in a covert. So we have looked at the road raising. We're doing that right now. We need to look at the environmental component which is the health of long and sampling coves and if the potential of putting in a covert or something to that effect would be beneficial. This grant, we did apply for it last year. It does have a 33% match to it last year. We put in 57.5, you'll see it in the 2024 budget. We didn't get the grant, but we'd like to apply for it again. It wouldn't be any less, any more than the 57.5 of which we asked for last year. What do you think our chances are of getting it this year? Third time to charm Mr. Trial. No actually in all fairness to that. After the last time I did speak with the person who puts on the grants or their Mr. Adito over at the EPA and we had a conversation about why because from you know when you look at the project on paper looks like a poster child for this and frankly they weren't aware that the money that we were we were FEMA grants take a long time by the way they took this one took almost two years to get. They weren't aware that FEMA only looks at life and safety. It doesn't look at the environment. It only looks at life safety and property. So the grant that we have right now is strictly road raising. It's life safety and property. And they were under the impression that we had money to do this other portion. We were just double asking. So I did clarify that with them last year. And I'm hoping with that clarification, there's a small number of people who work in that decision making realm. So we're on a semi-first name basis for a couple of them. They are aware that in fact, the FEMA money won't support the environmental component. Speaking of the FEMA money, just a big question. How secure is the FEMA money right now? Do we know if it's secure? We have a grant right now. We're operating under a FEMA grant right now. Yeah, we are. We are. One more time? It's not being taken away or anything like that. Oh, you mean frozen? Oh, no, not that I'm aware of right now. No, we're. OK, thanks. No. Yeah, I'll let them. That's actually kind of the direction. I was going to err on the side of caution with grant writing, how confident are we in obtaining the grants and where do we currently stand? It sounds like those were all clearly answered already. So. This is an ongoing project, Mr. Menzies. I feel like it's something that we, yeah. Yeah, that we're not, this isn't a new thought. We've been working at this for seven or eight years. Yeah. So hopefully that means. No, and again, from my previous experience, again, on the school committee side, my familiarity with the grant writing in this town is you all do exceptionally well at it. So it's always surprising and frustrating to hear when we don't get it. So again, I appreciate all of the continued efforts that go into the ongoing process of the grant applications. Thank you. So with the only other... Councilor of the next page. So, I'm going to move on to the next page. So, I'm going to move on to the next page. So, I'm going to move on to the next page. So, I'm going to move on to the next page. So, I'm going to move on to the next page. So, I'm going to move on to the next page. So, I'm going to move on to the next page. Great. So if we flip to the next page, which is my CIP. So I am asking for 75,000 for the next two years or for a total of 150,000 for the updating of our comprehensive plan as it's written in the description. So the comprehensive plan needs to be updated every 10 years. And the state law recently changed where they made it a little more urgent for municipalities to actually get their plans done and they said, okay, you have to do it every 10 years. And if it doesn't happen within two years of the expiration date, then you can no longer use your plan to make municipal decisions. So that's a pretty important thing for us and certainly for the town. Just by way of example, the last plan that we did started in September of 2012, and we didn't finish until September of 2017. So it took us five years. We're looking at doing this plan on a much, much expedited track, three and a half years at the top, because we need to be, we should be done by 2027 to make the deadline, but we have to be done by 2029. Is the say complete rewrite from the ground up? No, it wouldn't be a complete rewrite, but there are new things every year and there are new things that come down. So one thing we, typically in the past, the plans hadn't really looked up, but we'll be looking at a lot more and we'll be focusing a lot more. And it's touched on in our current plan, is climate change, sea level rise. We're surrounded by water. And it's, I don't want to say it is a hot topic, but it's more of an urgency for the town and area against it because we are surrounded either by the bay, by the ocean, by the pond, or by the river, which is also tidally influenced. So that's one of those things that they'd be taking a closer look at and trying to figure out where we can beef up the plan. So workers within your office or who exactly is working? No, so the way we've done it in the past is we would hire a consultant. We've got to bid in hire a consultant to do the work. It's it's a gillman's task bigger than what what our department can handle Council of McNally do you have any questions? No, I was just gonna ask whether the money was gonna be used to hire a consultant That's it would be we would go out to bid and you ultimately would select a consultant perfect And I'll just wait until you give me the OK that you've concluded with your presentation. That's actually good. Oh, well, all right. That's it for my budget. I'm going to move on to boys and commissions. Or do you want to do that now? Well, no. Unless you have any questions, no, we can move right on to boards and commissions. Great. I have questions for each of you that I forgot to ask at the very end of your presentation. Sure. Great. So the first one we're going to go to is historic district commission. That's a level funding. There's no change. Do we have any questions? Do you want to, Ms. Councillor, do you want to go ask questions each way or do you? No, you can go right through and for the I'll take a time and I'll open up the floor after. Do you want to, Ms. Council President, do you want to go ask questions each way or do you know you can go right through and for the sake of time and then I'll open up the floor after. Thank you. So for the zoning board, there is a small slight increase. That's for again, mail service and that copy agreement that I mentioned earlier. We took the cost of that and spread it out through, through boys and commissions as well as the town budget. The next one is the conservation commission tree board. That's level funding. The next one is the planning board. And again, it has a slight increase under the mail service and copy agreement. Our management commission is level funding. The land trust is level funding. The land trust is level funding. The land trust is level funding. The land trust is level funding. The land trust is level funding. The land trust is level funding. The land trust is level funding and the Affordable Housing Trust Collaborative No Change. Just a general question on the affordable housing. I know that there was a request that I had forwarded over, does that get considered later? Or I'm just interested as to, because I know requests came through from the affordable housing for 50,000 to consider going to them. So I just wonder where that would get considered. That would be considered during the work sessions. Or I think it's on my slide for later on during the public hearing or the work sessions. One of those, but it gets considered later and if you approve it, then it gets put in as a transfer. So that's at its pretty simple. A lot of level funding. That's great. When it comes to affordable housing and all of these other committees and boards, how does the funding go about? Does a committee apply just for our own education? For instance, the diversity equity inclusion committee, not that they'd ever asked for money, but if they were to come forward and ask for assistance, do they just send an email and we just, and we work through that, just wondering. Yeah, they could send an email. If a committee wanted a budget, then we'd have to decide and then we put in the budget. Thank you. Next year. And then I'll actually open up the floor to any of the council members if they have any questions before I ask my final question Don't all run it jump in at once It would be it would be the copy agreement contract and then we put in a little bit extra for printing and mailing I believe. Anything else? All right. So, I will ask a general question for each of you. And this is just for our education, and this is always a fun question too that we used to do on the school committee side. Is there anything that is not in the budget that you wish was in the budget that you could include anything? And you probably hate this question. But this is just for our own education, just like catching us up to speed. Is there anything that you wish you could add into your budget? That is not currently sitting in the budget. And if you don't know at this time, you can always come back later. I can pretty much confidently say that really isn't anything that we're missing at this point. We've had a good number of years to get it up to where it should be, where it is now, as you see it. So we're good. Thank you for asking, though. Thank you. I know. That's a good question. I wish I'd had it ahead of time. Oh, that's all right. Didn't think that. Wow. My first response is more people. Yeah. Certainly more people, but not at the moment, but I will reserve that thought for next year when I see you. Excellent. For this. Thank you. And unless there's any other questions? Oh, you can make it after. I just want to thank you all for being here, for the council, for, and for you guys for taking this opportunity to come to us for the first two work sessions. It kind of lightens the load for the later budget workshops, but it's also a good preview of coming attractions. So really appreciate the thorough presentations. If anyone on the council has any additional questions, please feel free to reach out to each department head as you can. Otherwise, thank you so much and we'll see you at regular session. Thank you.