and this is the same that's in the the pack again and up there meeting call to order today is Monday March 4th 2024 this is the speci special budget meeting for The Bu of Oakland an adequate notice has provided U missen would you please read the statement of compliance this meeting is being held in accordance with the open public meetings law duly announced advertised and posted in the municipal building the meeting will adjourn no later than 10: p.m unless the majority of the council members that are present vote to extend the time all rise for flag tell hi of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under godible with liy and justice for all thank you roll call Mayor K pres councilwoman goo presid councilman mccan councilman Pig nelli here council president saniy here councilman slinsky here councilman talamini here CF David Young here for administrator Richard C here a motion excuse Mr MC some moved second all favor hi hi at this time do we have a motion to open to public so moved second not seeing any public motion to close so moved second all very good Mr Coons and Mr Young would you guide us through the budget presentation Mr Coons we'll start with you sure uh thank you mayor uh thank members of the council uh so this is the first of two publicly scheduled budget hearings uh with the second one being this Wednesday night when we hear from the fire department and DPW and the police department tonight we're going to provide you with an overview of the budget asically take you through the summary of it talk about the financial condition of the burrow uh and then we'll hear from Peter H the director of the library and Mike wo and Neil malood from Recreation and they'll talk about their budget plans for the year getting right into it uh if you want to go to the first slide so the budget process just a word about the process itself and then I think we'll come back to process of where we go from here at the end of the meeting too so our budget process begins in September and budget packages go out to all of the agencies volunteer boards and commissions and departments they work very diligently on developing their proposals uh then later in the fall uh David and I meet with them uh go through their budget proposals and uh see what adjustments may need to be made uh based on what we're seeing in terms of uh programs that we want to accomplish uh inflationary adjustments other way you know efficiency measures that we can Implement in the like uh when we get to the new year we turn our attention uh to also then looking a little bit deeper at the financial condition of the burrow and meeting with the finance committee and reviewing our budget plans with them so the document that you have before you to tonight uh is something that was started at the department agency level uh went through David and I involved the finance committee uh and is really a a sort of a collaborative effort uh to put together a budget for the burrow uh that funds are operations and is responsible for the long-term needs of the community so uh with that I want to thank everybody that's been involved to this point uh the department heads and agency heads do a a very good job very responsible job uh and so this has gone through several meetings and uh I think this is the starting point for deliberations amongst the entire governing body so with that uh I'll just get right into it uh funding for the current fund budget as opposed to the one and Sewer which we'll be talking about in more depth on Wednesday night for the current fund budget including the library is presented at 2,544 198 uh and that is uh compl compant with the both the appropriation and Levy caps uh it would require a tax levy including the library which we'll talk about later of $8,495 180 uh Which is 2.66% higher than in 2023 right uh I think we'll just get right into Appropriations if you want yeah Mr C just for the council we want this to be interactive so if you have questions anybody Council anything can this more of a workshop session as well this has been updated it may look exactly the same as it has for the past 5 years but we have updated every year and it is amazing when you put the numbers in it does not change um the municipality including the library and open space is right around 24 to 25% of the total Levy um of the taxes that we collect when you include the school the regional and the the county so this just kind of shows um what our piece of the total tax buy is any questions about that before can't have a budget meeting without a pie chart we got more than one I think it's a good representation about where how you how we divy up you know the taxpayers dollar shows exactly where it goes it's you know it's not 100% of the taxes are for the municipal budget it includes seven components of the uh of the total taxes right just want to make that I know you know that I'm just making the public very good point uh Rich mentioned statutory compliance uh we have two caps that we have to work with from the state uh one is on the tax levy uh that's a 2% cap um on the appropriation side you passed an ordinance allowing us to go to three and a half we are compliant to both uh we will be using some C Bank in both cases as well uh but the budget as is is is a solid one as far as the state's conc concerned um first up in terms of the data for everybody to take a look at is the net increase to the average homeowner uh this year that's coming out to $675 that's a 2.1% increase over the municipal portion of their tax bill from last year you will see Levy numbers that are different total budget numbers that are different but when you apply the levy the change to assess value from the assessment info we got from Scott all that kind of helps us figure out what the average impact is going to be to the average homeowner so this is that number um so you know what the what the nut is what the bottom line is and the average home is 479 just shy of 580 yeah like 579,000 in change uh we'll see that in slides in a few few pages okay any questions on compliance uh one one final note on compliance you as we move to introduction you'll see the uh uh annual appropriation cap rate ordinance that we do every year in conjunction with that uh to go up to 3.5% on the appropriation cap so that's just a component of the the adoption process that we have to follow okay so uh this is a very high level view of uh the where the Appropriations stand right now uh and as presented this would maintain all existing uh Services provides a slight increase in fing for Capital Investments uh and include some money as well uh to start on Redevelopment planning activities which which we talk about more a little bit later on some of the significant budget challenges we had this year were in the areas of property casualty and workers comp insurance which I think you're all aware of uh that was a 15% plus increase uh due to a variety of factors out there in the marketplace uh and in the regulatory landscape in New Jersey 15% you said uh roughly yeah I think one went up 17 health insurance went up 20 no health insurance didn't sorry other way other we'll we'll get to that we'll get to those numbers specifically uh Solid Waste in in particular recycling so the solid waste contract uh has a built-in escalator it's a five it's a three-year agreement disposal costs have a built-in escalator uh and the single biggest impact there is on the cost to dispose of recyclables remember years and years ago we used to get money for our recyclables now we have to pay to get rid of them uh at a per ton rate that's actually higher than the cost of garbage at the moment uh so there was a significant budget impact going into this year due to experience from last year and what we where we expect those prices to be in 2024 okay and the the prices those prices is that the how much of it is is it is it um I'll close the dump you know the dump is setting the the fee or is the are is the the garbage company you know is is the dump charging $5 and the garbage company's charging us $8 so we have a separate collection contract that does not include the disposal of the garbage at all right so so our collection contract is just to pick up the waste curbside take it to the facility and dump it The Dumping fees themselves what they call the Tipping fees are under separate contract and those rows exponentially yes not so much on the garbage side we're in I think year two of a fiveyear agreement uh there are some cost escalators built into that contract but that was nothing too crazy uh it was really all about the recyclables this year and so that's I mean so that's just we're sort of we're stuck with because there's only so many places where you can dump stuff yes right so so we're stuck with what we have okay when we B when we bid out uh it was a joint bid with whiteoff and Franklin Lakes for disposal uh with whiteoff being the lead agency and we actually had three biders so that was a competitive bid uh we're a little bit more constrained actually on the recycling side in terms of recycling facilities that are within a approximate distance from the burrow uh currently we're we're tipping with Atlantic Coast fibers and uh they're standing up a new facility uh should be completed a little bit later this year I spoke with Rich about this uh Wayne and I think Anne Patterson um got permission to take bids from an outside company in New York they saved a million dollar so I know Richard said they have and in order to do that they have to get permission from the state is that correct Rich well there whether they're an whether they're a New Jersey based company or a New York based company there's criteria there state requirements that they need to meet so hopefully next time around uh because well you know there's a lot going on in the in the solid waste field we can talk about more on Wednesday night but um this is year two of a three-year contract so we'll be out to bid next year again for garbage collection and uh you know any any and all information we can get on uh potentially viable bids is is useful information so maybe contact Wayne I think it's Wayne they saved a million dollars that's a lot of lot of it's a lot of money a lot of money right okay uh so let me give you just a very high level overview here of what's happening with appropriation uh and then as we go through you're going to see we'll annotate things um numbers you know we try to give you an Apples to Apples comparison where possible uh as you know we just moved the rec budget to a trust uh so sometimes it's a little difficult you know you have to sort of have to account for that when you're looking at year-over-year comparisons um but overall just raw numbers here uh salaries and wages uh inside cap are increasing 1.75 or so other expenses are up about 1.3 and inside cap total is up about 1.5% outside cap I think to largely to the shared service agreements we've entered into uh for sle3 services with the k38 district uh as well as CFO services with uh with uh Hillsdale uh sort of pushed up that salary and wage number but those items have offsetting non- tax revenues behind them as well so when you say outside the cap the the state says there must be a 2% uh limit and the outside cap of those that are Exempted from it this is what we're talking about specifically here is the appropriation cap rather than the tax levy cap uh but yes there are certain items that are outside of the appropriation cap so they have no control of how much it goes up like Insurance well for ex I'll give you an example is not outside the cap we got a onetime exemption from it is inside inside the Appropriations cap uh Debt Service is a good one right they don't want any count to default on their debt so they made that an exclusion to the appropriation cap okay shared service agreements because the state wants to incentivize shared service Agreements are considered outside the cap right so we've done a lot with shared service agreements over the last year you're seeing that reflected here but again there's an offsetting Revenue uh payments coming in from those other government alignments M uh grants as we talk about every year we start out the the year uh and then we uh bring those additional Grant funds into the budget as those grants are awarded uh so that number is down but that's always the case uh Public Library so we got less grants and why is that misleading what we have is less less grants than we had at the end of last year if I went back and looked at what we had during budget during budget we're about the same in terms of the grants we have but we get most of our grants as you process throughout the year CB CD a good example so this could change it will absolutely change every time you do a chapter 159 correct that's a grant we're putting in the budget all of those show up in last year is amended that's why at the top it says amended 20123 amended all the way up yeah right so that's that's what the amendment is usually taking into account anything that we do through a chapter 159 okay thank you do okay uh Public Library their uh tax levy is set by State formula of a third of a mill calculation that actually went down a little bit this year uh so you see that reflected uh there about 10 about almost $111,000 Less in uh Appropriations and revenue for the library uh and then of course you have the reserve for uncollected taxes which we refer to as a non-s spending appropriation uh the municipality is the collection agent for all those other entities on that pie chart the schools the county they get made whole they get 100% of their Levy we get whatever's left so uh you know if your collections are anything less than 100% you basically have to budget for that uh to make sure that you have enough money there to fully fund your operation I think that's what people don't might not understand is that when someone is Exempted from the taxes we don't get the money but we still have to give the share to the to the county if it's an exemption let's say a fully disabled vet yeah think it is treated the same as let's say a nonprofit entity right it just comes off the tax RS so neither the county the schools get any money from them either the rest of the tax base picks up good their good thank you uh and that's up 2.1% generally tracking you know your overall uh Levy change so just in in raw numbers the total budget is up 1 Point uh 8% so just just a question so are we getting all the grant money for the bridge and everything is that going to be reflected that's not going to be reflected there thank you uh often times when we have specific Capital grants uh those are uh pledged against a specific Capital ordinance uh and you're not going to see them directly flow through the grant club like that on the annual financial statement you would see a specific section on Capital where we have all the capital Grant receivables this just captures a current f Grand receivables thank you so our total uh budget for expenses only went up 1.08 yes very good well now now we'll get into some detail on that hold on right well you know we as I said there's some apples to apples adjustments that need to be made here uh because of what you know changes that has incurred so we we're going to get into those very shortly all right uh this is a new this is a new pie chart uh just for you thank you so I heard you like pie charts and you know t i I've seen entities government government entities schools and whatnot slice this pie any number of ways uh what this is sort of meant to reflect is when you look at our spending what is devoted to Personnel so all the blue shaded stuff uh are Personnel related cost direct salaries and wages which are your salary and wage budgets and then your pension and your health benefits budgets which are considered OE but they're really Personnel related costs those uh account for 57.1% of the budget I have a question I'm sorry to keep asking but uh is there a percentage of your budget that's recommended for salary and wages no a direct a direct percent no okay it it really varies by the size of your organization and the type of services that you provide somebody who did not have wreck or seniors would not have those two right entities in and we're as small as we are you know one or two departments would make a large large difference you know another example conversely if you're a town that does uh garbage collection in house you're going to have a relatively larger percentage of your uh spending devoted to salaries and wages relatively smaller portion to OE because you're not going to have that contract that's what we have to keep in mind when we keep saying we should collect our own garbage we know we should get out of Contracting for garbage and we should have our own Department collecting garbage I think there was some that some estimate was it a million dollars a truck I don't know that it's a million uh cly six figures it was it was a quite large figure I don't remember the exact number but yeah we're actually uh just starting to embark on a study with an outside consultant this was the reap Grant uh that the flow towns secured last year um just waiting to hear the Frank Lakes awarded that contract to the consultant uh and that's going to be about a six Monon Endeavor uh to study our solid waste collection programs uh look at how we can work together does it make sense to do uh sure keep it outside does it make sense to have a lead agency take it over and bring it all in house uh we'll be getting into the nitty-gritty of all of that in the coming months one of the advantages we would be outside the cab if it IT contract share service yeah if you want to stop by some time I can talk to you about where Wharton is with their garbage because it kind of toss a little bit about that and give you a little bit deeper perspective in terms of doing it in-house versus out house good okay so capital in debt is about 14 14.4% if you then take uh your Solid Waste which is you know roughly now about 10% of our overall budget uh that's kind of as you all know dramatically over the last four or five years uh that's 82% or so so everything else uh most of the money that uh is on the table that you're going to hear from the Departments about in terms of their spending uh is in that 18% and the and the solid waste went up what a million dollars from 2020 to where we were today approximately maybe a yeah about that about a million dollars about that yeah okay I was 10% of our budget big 2.5 that's big okay next slide it's the chart we have a couple of them for you U Pat if you could please read line seven okay uh so so this and and the two slides behind it uh take a deeper dive into what's going on with the Appropriations uh and we tried to pull out some of the uh you know impactful uh budget items and important things that we're trying to fund in this budget and I'm just going to start to go go right down again if you have a question about something just jump in right so this this is the salary and wage budgets Uh current fund salary and wage budgets including the library are projected to increase overall by 3 uh 3.25% or so all right uh General government now what we classify as general government are all of your core administrative Services my office General Services uh Communications Commission Green Team mayor and Council clerk uh those budgets are up by over about 3.7% um you're going to see the large increase seemingly large increase I would say seemingly large increase there in my sing wage uh in my budget uh that's actually because of a reallocation for the assistant position uh among my budget and the Clark's budget you see uh the Clark's budget is down somewhat it also includes funding for a summer archive intern that is a program uh that you funded last year through Capital get sort of Kickstart that endeavor uh that project is underway now starting to focus on Code Enforcement and uh the building department and all of their records uh it sort of syncs up nicely with uh the coming uh Advent of digital plan submittals uh and the likee for UCC which is a state mandate and this position would uh just work in the summertime and start relieving the backlog and cleaning out archives and uh starting to get us caught up the secondary benefit to that is the clerk's office Wendy how many opras are you up to so far for the first two month about 200 a lot of those are real estate related related to real estate transactions and the like uh the sooner that all of those are digitized uh the more staff time that we save in fulfilling those requests so uh so there's about $6,000 in the admin uh you in that area to fund that position okay uh Finance uh budget is up by $21,000 but there is a $ 36,7 offset uh for the shared service with Hillsdale for the what for the shared service with Hillsdale Hillsdale MH uh land use that's planning board zoning board environmental commission and the code enforcement office which involves uh building fire prevention zoning uh and property maintenance uh there by 14% that includes two promotions in Code Enforcement uh and the biggest chunk of that is we had a shared service with Bloomingdale that ended last year with the retirement of um our electrical inspector that we were using through Bloomingdale that shared service agreement did not renew so if you recall last fall we hired a a new part-time electrical sub code so basically there's a a swap from OE to salaries and wages it's just sort of reclassifying where those expenditures are taken from so it says code enforcement went up 15.7% why uh no yep yeah overall yeah but but a lot of that's just a switch from doing a shared service last year which was on the OE line so if you look the next page you'll see OE is down for code enforcement okay so it's moving money from this bucket into this bucket okay right okay uh Public Safety that's police including the sle3 program uh that we have with the k38 district and that that's costing us 100,000 uh no that's the amount of money that we have to put into the budget to fund the program uh for the salaries for the people on a full year basis but the I thought the school was paying the salary they do on the other side there's a revenue line item that's the exact same dollar amount okay just move just okay zero that cost that's what say when when there's an offsetting Revenue that's what I mean it sort of Zer out in terms of tax impact okay this is including uh the new fleo for the high school this does not yet that'll be that'll be chapter 159 okay okay uh all you although we would talk about if that gets adopted before budget adoption how we would handle that we could so it doesn't have it in here although we do expect that to occur uh this spring all right uh OEM flood control and fire basically all of our our emergency services and that is up uh salaries and wages there up 4.9% overall uh again a chunk of that is due to the sleo program the rest of the Police Department salaries and wages are up 2.6% uh this year's budget planning for police salaries was you know a little little challenging uh we have three officers set to retire during the course of the Year another two that'll go through the whole year and will retire as of January 1st of next year uh so there's a lot of work done to try to properly estimate out exactly what the budget impacts were of when they were retiring when new officers were coming on board uh but that number that you see there fully accounts for all of that the retirements of hiring additional officers to replace them uh including anticipating a couple through IGT couple through the academy um I thought the academy is closed did they reopen it uh well we don't have anybody in the current academy uh I have not heard that they're not going to be running a class in July that may get pushed uh a little bit to the fall okay um but we're working towards having officers in whatever class occurs later in so we have to uh intergovernmental transfers uh yes we're looking at those too we have a uh recruitment ad out right now through Civil Service uh and the police are looking at a couple of candidates and they'll get into that more when uh good when they're here on Wednesday okay thank you okay all right uh DPW lots of Divisions here uh that have their separate their own separate salaries and wage budget streets and Roads snow removal vehicle maintenance buildings and grounds storm water management uh and solid wasting recycling overall those budgets are up 70.9% uh that includes their contractual increases and for promotions uh for staff members as well so when it's in parentheses that's an increase that's a decrease decrease I mean yeah the other thing is between last year's budget and this year we did a reallocation of a lot of the salaries so while oh my gosh what happened to Solid Waste last year could have been under allocated this year you know we catching up in terms of the budget so again DPW probably best look at as the net sum total because there was a lot of moving P pieces between between their departmental interde departmental budgets uh and Just sh when we C all of these budgets reflect contractual increases as well this is the last year of uh fiveyear labor agreements for all staff besides White Collar blue collar and uh uh PBA as well uh so for white and blue collar the increase this year is 2.5% or $1,900 uh whichever is more uh and for police it's 2% uh for TOP Step patrolman and above uh officers on the guide get their guide increases and any uh contractual longevity increases as well all right so that's all fully loaded in into these numbers okay uh Social Services that's Health wreck uh Senior Services access for all and uh those budgets are down and that is because the recreation program of course is moving to the trust uh the number that you still see there is full-time funding for the rec Aid everything else uh so all of your Camp C primarily your Camp counselors yeah and your Camp staff all of that all of that's moved to trust for 2024 I have a question yes access for all uh it's zero I thought it was another number you have uh there's $2,000 allocated in the OE budget this is just our this is just our uh and then of course we have uh accumulated absences uh which we fund for any uh payouts when people retire any accumulated uh SI leave that you're due per contract or vacation time uh comp time and the like that's something we it several years ago cuz we never had that and and and we'd have to include it in the current budget every time we we started doing that in 2009 or 2010 it's been a while uh there were there were there were a couple of very large payouts uh and what we were able to do is when those payouts were done we were able to basically leave that funding in place shift it over to a res uh to a reserve uh and it's it's fluctuated a little bit over the year uh and and yeah as David indicates we're pretty much at the peak now we have this large wave of police retirements coming up uh which just from a c look at it just cash flow from a cash flow perspective uh we needed to fund it to a certain amount to accommodate that we expected that number will come down a bit uh you know in subsequent years going for it's like a savings account for all these different items I mean there's more than one trust fund obviously it's just like having a savings account like like a household has a savings account and we go to that right okay so that's what's going on with the salary and wage budget we'll turn our attention to the departmental AE budget um which uh account for about $5 million in spending about 20% of the overall budget uh year-over-year they're down by 1.3% um but I'll put a little asterisk on that and hit that when we get to the to the bottom of the slide uh so the general government again that's Administration Communications mayor and Council Park and the like uh that is up uh about $15,000 that is specifically uh to fund uh a grant writer uh you know we have an opportunity here changes in my office and taking a look at it um I have some literature from several firms uh and if you decide to fund that we'll be going ahead with Contracting with a firm to uh help us out going forward in addition to the firms that we already Ed I just want to remind everybody that when it comes to dot Transportation uh grants we routinely use Boswell engineering for that sort of assistance uh we have historic preservation grants we're using con and hickey for that uh so those are sort of specialized this would be uh you know a more generalized firm uh that that can help us so this is a set fee not a percentage of Grant correct that's one of the things we're looking at all right uh there there are ones that do it based on a set fee there uh is another one that has a grant advisory service that is a monthly charge and will uh we and for which then we can contract hourly for any specific grant that we want them to write for us uh that gives us a little bit more flexibility uh than some of the other uh compensation approaches out there um but that's something you know if you want to fund this that we would look at closer didn't we uh was it two years ago or a year ago we fire department got close to4 million with the Scott pack through uh outside firm yes that was a company called Firehouse grants okay that we had contracted with specifically to write that particular Grant uh we also used them for a New Jersey uh fire department assistance grant for or I think it was a washing like turnout gear y okay and what did what firm did we use for the buy out on Truman uh H the uh Land Conservancy of which we still contract with to help us with open space issues okay so okay uh Finance related items uh are up 10.6 % but again there's uh an offset there that's due to the shared Service uh with Hillsdale and fully implementing that for the for the full year uh land use budgets are actually down by $25,000 this is what I was talking about before Pat where uh we don't have that shared service anymore so we had hired somebody you're seeing in offsetting decrease in OE expenditures as a result of that here okay Public Safety is up a rather nominal amount overall of 6% uh the sle3 program in terms of the operating cost that is the really the main cost to outfit the officers with body armor uh and radios and weapons and all in all of their gear that pretty much ran at course last year so now it's more maintenance items going forward so we were able to reduce that budget so you're seeing uh a reduction ction there from 45,000 to 10,800 uh the police OE otherwise is up by uh 133% 23,500 uh Keith and uh Vinnie D will get into that it's a lot of it related costs uh those costs just continue to sort of increase Beyond uh probably what's reasonable but there's an awful lot of uh programs that we rely upon to run a modern Police Department uh and a lot of focus in attention on cyber security as well so now like the accreditation program uh um I don't know if anyone's familiar with that but it's a uh a book for every procedure that the that the police department is involved in and everyone on the police force has to be familiar with that so that everything is enforced in a uniform manner yes helps helps protect us from any liability right right and the the accreditation process I mentioned here uh is a sort of a companion uh program that the JF has started up for fire departments so this is a lot of this is a one-time cost there will probably be some ongoing costs but that $13,500 increase for the fire department is for them to go through an accreditation process uh you know you can kind of think of it in the same manner that uh the police department goes through accreditation as well is the GIF providing any monetary incentives for us to do that or compensation uh I'll have an answer for you on that I don't I don't recall up hand I know when it comes to the PD uh there is sort of a credit given on our final bill of the Year where they knowe that we're an accredited agency um I don't know if fire department is going to work the same way or not I'll just do some research on that thank you okay uh Public Works excluding Solid Waste is up 99.9% uh what you see there are several things happening uh engineering and planning I've mentioned Redevelopment activities earlier uh that $220,000 increase in the engineering and planning OE uh is money for a Redevelopment study a lot of that is sort of undefined in terms of where exactly we're going to focus our efforts um but we know that that's a priority uh we thought it was it would be best to fund something there at this point as we were finding out with the planner later this spring just like for our downtown program corre uh right so uh they should be pretty much be wrapping up their Redevelopment assessment uh and then I think probably the next step is going to be to start looking at specific areas uh to focus on so well I heard two different things you said reel assessment Redevelopment study so what you have planned for is the outcome of the assessment to do more detailed work correct yes okay I want to make sure that's right right you may recall uh when the planner if it was 23 or 22 uh came in and we talked about uh uh Rehabilitation versus Redevelopment correct there are statutory criteria that need to be met in order to declare something in need of Rehabilitation need of Redevelopment that's sort of the study I'm talking about uh do we want to take a look at this block or this block and see if it meets those statutory criteria uh and you know move forward in some fashion so there's some funding in the budget specifically and with the anticipation that that's what we're going to want to do that's what's called planning we're planning to plan planning to plan coffee okay uh shade tree commission uh there's an increase there is there Al we increased I know we increased Forester um yeah so sh Tre got inreased Forester and for planting based upon the revenues they got last year so that floats through the next cycle for them uh and I think having a Forester has been working out very well in terms of you know procedurally uh in terms of the responsiveness that we can provide to Residents uh it's you know just having that resource there somebody with that knowledge and the fees are covering the cost correct uh that's actually a good question and something I wanted us to take a look at I know the fees were initially designed to cover what we expected the cost to be uh we should actually go and run that analysis and make sure that they're doing that could that person help us with any type of uh Lantern fly uh batement so yes the um the Forester is more dealing with the trees the maintenance of it and the zoning board excuse me in the um in the ordinances so probably separate he would not wouldn't follow this priew or he would have the time we actually ran out of hours last year in the tree okay uh when we get down to DPW you're going to see that big number there of $193,000 uh Solid Waste is going from 2,163 th000 to 2,356 uh 178 um oh okay so this all of our Solid Waste contracts uh are up about 100 about 178 is for our contracts 95,000 of that alone is for the disposal of recyclables we had anticipated $20,000 in last year's budget actual was about 115,000 wow so we're not getting we're not getting any Revenue go uh well you will actually see a revenue line so for example when we do a capital project we tell the contractor to give us the storm stord rates if they have to be replaced so we can recycle that material the getting is heavy you know our I think our recycling Revenue we have it here is probably on the order of $10,000 a year and it's not from Curbside collection wow the market has completely in the last 10 years has completely swung like a penel it cost us money to recycle yes yes and we're already dual stream we've done all those dual you know single stream was was the big thing if you recall about 10 years ago yes and we were a rather early adopter on that and it actually helped recycling rates drove up recycling rates up by about 10% uh and then China decided Well we don't want your contaminated recyclables anymore and sort of shut their doors and the market struggle ever since okay to the point now for the first time in my career it costs more to dispose of a ton of recyclables than it does a ton of garbage so it's probably I'm not telling people to go out and throw their recyclables in garbage uh we you know mandatorily we we're required to have a program um but it just kind of goes to show how far the market is out of whack and still trying to adjust to uh recycl are going in they're going in a landfill in a lot of cases if they determine that the load's contaminated for whatever reason uh yeah they they throw it away so and we're paying a premium yeah great okay uh Social Services uh not much of an increase there the big decrease there of course you see is with Recreation uh down 336,000 uh that represents moving wreck uh to trust as we just authorized at the last meeting there is $555,000 uh that is left there that is uh sort of consider seed money uh to get them to get them started but David do you want to spend a minute and talk about that a little um yeah so they also have their Banner program kind of similar to the shade tree where they used to run their tree permits through the trust and get that money immediately State said no not a dedicated rider for that so the revenues that they bring in we give them the following year into the budget so Rec Rand a very successful Banner program last year 20,000 is $20,000 that came in so we need to make sure that get that money into the budget since they don't have an operating budget with the inside current fund I'll do it just to transfer off to the trust with that uh there's also some monies from leftover 2023 budgets that they're still spending um for the winter program that cross over from one year to another so we're getting money over there for that but you can only do that for a certain period of time right correct four months 6 months we can only make budget transfers between budgets but their entire budget we can sweep into the trust because that's the purpose of the trust right we do that with snow removal every year we take the snow removal monies that we haven't spent prior year and then we move them into storm Reserve how are we doing with snow removal this year not bad really it's right right it's been a relatively light season again okay and then that can't be put back in for two years uh well as indicated what what we'll do at the end of The Reserve budget year is you sweep that money into the trust fund all it that you can spend for oh good want whenever we need it cool good okay uh and and just a note on that too it's not just a snow removal Reserve anymore it is a storm Reserve so if we were to have extraordinary expenses related to let say a flood event and we had a contract with a uh you know add collections to dispose of of garbage um bring in equipment to facilitate repairs that can all be paid for out of that trust the budget good and again if we got FMA reimbursement or GIF reimbursement you float that money back into the trust but that way youve got a place to spend add rather than current fund right all right uh Court think we'd already talked about this maybe earlier in the year when we were doing the contract uh there's a small increase there for the prosecutor the Court's been adding some sessions uh we've been very active in terms of uh traffic enforcement and someons uh and that translates into more workloads for the court as well uh and the need for prosecut prosecutor Services uh municipal courts OE side it manifests itself in things like interpreters and the cost of interpreters goes up that's not something that the defendant pays for that's something that the municipality pays for uh so there's a you know there are cost effects to that increased activity right uh so the the again the sum of the department budgets is a reduction of 1.3% just for the solid waste impacts and Recreation everything else is up 3% is up what is up 3% about right in line with oh yeah right there yeah 3.7 CPI was 3.1 for the area it's not bad okay uh miscellaneous expenditures which account for roughly 40% of overall spending about 10 million of $25 billion in the current fund uh and this is a variety of things uh Information Technology legal our annual audit Insurance utilities and the like um they're up uh about 3% year over year you're going to see their information technology is up 16% $23,000 again there's additional software that uh uh that we're using a lot again in terms of cyber security protections like anti- malware programs the trustify program on our email that we all love so much oh yeah uh you know things like that everything to safeguard our information Safeguard our our networks uh and it's you know you never quite know if it's money well spent but I'm looking at it as money well spent right now there was a hospital that had to go out of operation for a couple of days because of malware you you still hear about ransomware attacks right the like uh legal budget this is the other area where we put some money for redevelopment activities $10,000 uh for any uh you know legal assistance that we would need as we try to stand up a Redevelopment program any advice that we need um so we just as sort of a placeholder at the moment we put a little B bit of money there all right Insurance uh kind of a tale of two budgets here Insurance uh other that's property liability workers comp overall that's up 14% year-over-year uh what's driving that a variety of factors uh on the property side uh just the market place due to the number of natural disasters in the United States is just driven premiums through the roof cyber security premiums uh continue to escalate uh to the extent that the joint Insurance Fund which had been buying a fully insured product for all of the member municipalities actually stood up its own joint Insurance Fund specific specifically to deal with cyber security issues the nice thing about that is they've come out with some uh I think some really useful value added services in terms of training uh penetration testing and the like uh that are often difficult to procure very costly to procure on your own um but certainly that's something that's driving the insurance marketplace right now as well and on workers comp uh and you can probably go to the Mel website and read about this uh David grub the executive director put out a a report on this late last year uh New Jersey has the highest workers comp cost in the nation and a regulatory environment uh that continues to get worse and worse from the perspective of the employer uh in terms of fee shifting in terms of uh changing statute of limitations creating additional it's um you know certain things are presumed uh to be compensable under workers comp that used to not be presumed to be compensable so it's been sort of a perfect storm in a lot of ways what the insurance professionals tell me is that that insurance market for workers comp Property and Casualty is as bad if not worse than it was 40 years ago uh when the market was so bad that it actually led to the creation of the joint Insurance funds in the first place uh so it's something that uh I think in the last couple of years the JF worked very hard to limit those increases they largely SP they spent down huge amounts of their Surplus to try to forall that uh I think they really didn't have anywhere else to go this year so it's a large General increase certainly the largest we've seen here in certainly your time here probably 10 years or more uh and I'd say we're probably not done feeling the pain of that uh I'd say you're probably going to be looking at a rather large increase next year as well wow security are are is every employee do they get some type of training yearly uh so the GIF cyber program is going to be started that's going to be an hour and a half training uh and we contract with a provider called no uh they do like monthly short like five minute cyber security programs on fishing attacks and you know all those sort of relevant topics that an end user needs to be aware of so every employee we have goes today everybody that incl us including us right you guys get it too on your email right if if you basically if you have an email account you have a Network login you get you get okay uh on the flip side health insurance this year I know that says 3% if David were to move shift that decimal point over uh it's actually about 2.6% overall on the health insurance budget uh which is actually below inflation well below uh inflationary pressures in the health insurance marketplace right now which is certainly feeling the effects on the uh prescription side due to new medications coming out and you know these new medications are are great there's a lot of new medications coming out for cancer treatment weight loss and the like they're very expensive they're having a material impact on prescription rates on renewals uh this so this is maybe a third of or or or a fourth of what market rate trend is right now uh I think done a great job in uh putting cost control measures in place and a little bit of it is is sort of happen stance we have a younger Workforce now just actuarially uh that has an impact as well um so often times there's the rate increase and then there's the budget increase they don't always sync up because you have different changes with employees retiring new employees coming in people waving people adding a dependent people dropping um this year around and this fully loads in all of those changes anticipated retirements additional staff uh all of that and it came out right to be about what the actual premium rate increase was about 2.6% or so wow that other Town's budget that I work on occasionally 20% is their health 20% but it's a lot of it's from they're on the state health benefits plan but a lot of it is the mix that rich just talked about additional people oh that's the state program that's on state program yeah very thankful we're not in the state program yeah yeah okay uh one bright spot compared to last year uh is our all of our utility costs electricity street lights telephone natural gas and the like uh that's up only 1% overall uh they were pretty much holding the line there a lot of the utilities I think received rate increases last year uh especially with natural gas think that really negatively affected us um but pretty much pretty much much flat for can we shop that much the the util utility you can shop Supply uh your natural gas supply and your electric supply we are a member of the njm sustainable energy joint meeting there's over a 100 municipalities Statewide in that cons right purchasing Consortium um the challenge is we're in the Rockland electric territory it happens to be the smallest territory in New Jersey uh so whereas in the past ask other groups if they have jcpnl or Atlantic Electric or p uh they're finding qualified biders uh and by qualified I mean um the sem usually sets a strike price which means like a minimum bid amount Five Below the 5% below the BPU tariff uh it's been more challenging finding those sort of conforming bids in the Orange and Rockland territory because the electrical load that they're guaranteed is much smaller so sometimes we on that sometimes we're on tariff rate it it it depends on how the bidding goes each bidding round U but that's just for Supply when it comes to transmission and delivery it's BPU tariff uh another bright spot this year compared to last year is our pension obligations uh up 1% for purs uh and 2% for pfrs that's uh for police uh over we all uh they're only at 1.8 % uh combined and then we have the capital Improvement fund and uh and our debt obligations debt is about flat you're going to see a bit of an increase there in bond principle of $40,000 almost dollar for dollar reduction in bond interest uh and over if you were to take a look overall at what we're doing in the uh capital and debt area of the budget is to in Trend that up by 2% um you know we all know that we're trying to get to pay as you go uh and that the big issue there will be with roads um but you know we feel we don't want to put ourselves further behind the eight ball with doing that uh and then a 2% increase there uh would be you know a modest way to try to at least keep Pace with where we're at in able being able to fund everything else uh with with um you know basically with cash so with that Capital Improvement fund goes up from about 1,233 to about $1.3 million uh and then the rest of the items there the revaluation special emergency support for utility reserve for tax appeals uh those are unchanged from last year MH those three items will have hopefully some downward trending over the next couple of years as we get through the Ral that was a fiveyear we're in year two three three on the um support for utility that ends next year and theoretically the ongoing reval will allow us to reduce our reserve for tax appeals because eventually as that variance between reality and what we're taxing people shrinks you have fewer fewer appeals um so there's some budget flexibility there in the future where we'll get some of that some of that back into budget for other things okay next slide 2024 Capital plan I just want to make a couple of brief remarks about this tonight uh we certainly do not intend to go through this line by line you'll be meeting with BPW uh and NPD um and you know we can certainly have additional discussions on the plan but this is where it stands in terms of draft form at the moment everything fully loaded uh would stand at $2.7 million and there would be sufficient funding in the capital Improvement fund to to cover everything but a road program as it stands right now we would need to um you know finance that um but I think like last year we're going to ask that you hold off on doing anything in terms of funding what essentially is the 2025 Road program because we're usually funding for the year ahead um until the fall there's some things that we're working on uh that may result with some Grant Revenue coming in that we would be able to dedicate towards uh you know to funding the road the road program and again doing it without incurring debt um but everything else there's sufficient resources on hand to not have to uh to finance anything so for the people listening at home we just heard that the 2024 Road program is already funded already funded corre cuz we've been just people been talking about that right got a big roads we got to do David before we moved on did you want to add anything on the CLE uh no um again we've gone through this with department has looked at you know what they requested um finance committee has gone through this as well um and as we get to the point of actually putting together the capital authorization that's when you'll get the real details of of everything okay you want to take the next sure uh the other side of Appropriations is the revenues um we have four main Revenue stream Surplus miscellaneous Revenue we always take the grants out to do we talked earlier they Flex so much our delinquent taxes very small for us because we do an Accelerated Tax sale excuse me and then the municipal Levy itself uh which drives the tax increase uh Surplus is going up by about 105,000 uh this fits within our Surplus policy we'll take a look at that in a second in more detail um miscellaneous revenue is actually down slightly um this just you know flexes based upon what we're bringing in and out of the budget in terms of individual line items uh some a little bit less some a little bit more each year um that's roughly where we've been you know last few years and what we think will trend for the next uh delinquent tax receipts don't have anything in a budget typically we have 10,000 we can probably put that back back in I'm not sure why that came in as a zero um but we may put that back in for you and then we have the tax levy which we talked about a little bit earlier we'll see a trend for that in a second um overall just like Appropriations the revenue budget's up by 1.08% what came out of that is the rec revenues right they're uh now off in a trust so we're no longer anticipating them inside of current F questions on Revenue just a bit clear that's upper above it's 2023 on 2013 right above the P chart to the left yes [Music] okay 2013 is yes that is comparison it's 2013 yes I want to show you where we were 10 years ago to where we are today and you can see the biggest difference is the amount of surplus that we anticipate in the budget okay at this level we don't believe we can sustain that forever you know budgets will squeeze and that will come back down and think about where we were in 2017 18 192 about 1.5 1.6 is where we want to have that on an ongoing basis okay here is the tax levy increase over time um the green Dash dotted line is the increase in the residential tax bill you can see the blue line which is the municipal tax levy is a little bit different um and you can see in 22 and 23 both there was a significant shift to non-residential um when we went through those revals so while the budget may have increased more the impact to the tax taxpayer for the residential side is somewhat less uh the average over the past 12 years or so is 1.9% increase on the residential tax bill and to bottom you can see what's change in terms of the individual lams feeding it good and we're and we're allowed to go 2% and over the and we're we're at 1.9 we allow to go 2% for items that are inside the levy cap okay we're we're that 2.87 is what the tax levy increase is but some of that is outside of cap and we do have cap bank that we're using a little bit up so the average homeowners bill will go up 1.9% uh no two well yeah 2.1 2.1 1.9 is the average for the past 10 years at their their increase 2.1 is what they're going oh yeah okay residential tax bill okay uh Surplus you know we run this analysis every year Surplus is a function of what you take out to fund your budget and then what you bring in during that year to replenish and get to your year end balance you have a surplus policy that says we have to be between 15 and 20% of the inside Appropriations cap for the prior year uh you can see we're compliant last year at 2.04 five we're compliant this year and next year we think using about 1.9 will have us compliant to where we think we'll be at the end of the year and what we do is we run the numbers we know how much we put into the Appropriations Reserve we know what we don't spend on that will roll into the budget for elapsing the Surplus next year that's the biggest piece that rolls into it the rut's pretty steady in terms of what we do in terms of the rut and what we collect from the uh reserve for uncollected taxes so we feel pretty good that that's going to be the number you so we're looking at the budget for next year we already have a pretty good idea what we'll be able to anticipate and you're comfortable with the policy for for the Surplus right stolen it and used it in another test just as it is because it is a good policy it really does set you a nice parameter if you look back at it over time you can see sometimes we squeeze closer to 15 other other times we were closer to 20 um and as you look at your replenishment and what we're doing in our budget especially it seems to keep us R in between those 15 and 20 okay and you know it's it's not like you could never exceed that one way or the other right it's your policy you can always change it if you felt there was some extraordinary circumstance that warranted that um but the good thing about staying within that is you you never get too far a field theoretically where you're going to need to take some really drastic action to to get it back within that range that could have some impact on on services or some extraordinary Financial pain on the on the public you know ever ever since the levy cap came into effect it's really sort of uh been a tale of moderation and the need for future budget planning and forecasting never been more important the Surplus policy helped support that of of sort of keeping everything on an even Fel so we're saying we can't we can't exceed between 15 and 20% use of of a surplus or it's 15 to 20% of your prior Appropriations that's what you want your balance to be after the budget now we could we could take $300,000 more and have no increase to the T Levy this year we have that cash it would put us outside of our Surplus policy and the result would be next year you would have a big gap in terms of what you can do for you know the the services that we provide to the residents so that's why you got to also watch is not only what are you doing now what cash do you have but what happens next year when you may not be able to utilize that much Surplus um and this is just the other side of surplus is how much fund balance do you have what is the actual amount at the end of the year again we are at a peak in terms of that there's been several things that have been unique to last few years that have driven some of that uh for example last year um based upon interest rates in 2022 we're only able to anticipate $1 120 $130,000 of Interest earnings well the interest rate went up to 4% last year and we realize almost $900,000 you know so that $700,000 difference between what we anticipated and what we brought in feed right into Surplus well it's not going to happen next year we know what the rates are so you know our anticipation is at a higher level so we expect the balance to be somewhat lower at the end of 2024 than it was at the end of 2023 and interest is probably the biggest single Drive of that and we've talked about most of these items already but again the net net at the end of the day is the average impact you know to the resident with the average home and for us roughly be about $67 we think the non-municipal will be about 250 how do we get there at the moment I don't have budgets from them as well as I have is an estimate based upon what they've done the last few years in terms of their increase um that that could be significantly less could be significantly more we will find out probably by adoption what that number looks like but for our part of the the pie yeah for 25% $677 so so these two we we provided you with the water utility and Sewer utility budgets I'll just hit on them very briefly and again uh we can talk about those in more detail on Wednesday when we're meeting with DWS uh water Appropriations would be up by 3.8% and again there's a lot of a lot of line item adjustments there between salaries and OE and capital and but as we talked about I think when we set the rates for this year uh if you look at the operating impact and the capital impact of pasas pretty much that entire uh increase is attributable to uh the impact of installing the past treatment units which uh you know certainly from Community Health perspective and a d compliance perspective uh it's a very good thing uh now of course we have two of our wells online the ones that were subject to the ACO um but this is the FL side of that right where we have to pay for it and that's where you're starting to see it um I think we probably would have been able to come in with this budget flat had it not been for the effect of the P treatment and we will see that again next year this year we have some interest on the short-term note as we go to long-term financing on that we're going to have start having principal payments as well so that's going to be another sizable chunk of operating expense that we have to add to the water utility and so if we get money from the class action suit um would that be we would use it to pay Down The Debt Service that's why probably until we know what's going to happen there we'll continue with short-term notes we won't do any long-term financing because we don't want to get tied into anything if we do have cash coming into all okay and what we are hearing is while we have no idea what the amount may be at this point we are hearing that we could be seeing money uh as soon as next year we don't know how much though right no at this point there's a whatever it is is better than nothing there there's a formula in the class action uh settlement documents that takes into account uh your flow rates and total pumpage on your wells uh and the past levels on those Wells and it sort of puts it into an algorithm says you know here's your here's your quote unquote Community impact uh ignoring for the fact that whether uh you know your MCL is you know one part per trillion over or a thousand parts per trillion you're you know your treatment Capital CLS are going to be the same uh but still that's how they were sort of deriving it um so you we will see something I just I don't know how much at this point uh so so sewer uh this budget was kept uh ex exactly flat year-over-year $534,000 no increase no uh increase rates uh you know we have the coming online starting in 2025 for the decommissioning of the sewage treatment plan and the work that we still need to do later this year uh to see how we can mitigate some of that cost impact on next year's budget but for this year's budget no increase to the rates no increase to the budget itself uh it accounts there for the flow going to nbcua there's a specific wine item there of $ 77,78 that is actually their bill uh that they've already sent to us because it's calculated on prior year they look at Water utilization and edus and some other stuff into their uh their their formula uh and what that enables us to do this year is uh actually put some additional funding directly into Capital there's a related inii project for the Oakwood NES sewer service area that we want to undertake uh it's important to minimize that nbcua number to make sure that the system is is watertight that it's not accepting any uh flow from uh some pumps or any groundwater infiltration from tree roots or cracks and and the like because that's just groundwater that's going and getting treated and we get build for that uh so once we do that I think the system is pretty much going to be going to be solid we just did Sky View uh year couple years ago years ago right um so that's what's uh sort of the the look ahead here for the sore budget for this year and next year and now I want to uh just recognize the gentleman in in the audience uh first up we have Peter H the library director he is going to come up and he is going to give you an overview of the library budget and how that supports uh the operations of the library hey everybody how are you here spoke to Rich this afternoon he said 15 minutes tops this part real Qui okay so I was only off by an hour yeah it was close it was close okay so um obviously you guys see a big picture here um I can break down a little bit the smaller picture and then if you have any questions about what it is that we do um I'd be happy to answer it speaking generally about our budget as Mr said um as the equalized value valuation Rises so do our revenues and as it falls so as our revenues we're unlike other Municipal departments in that regard uh we you know our funding changes year to year it's been um in increasing over time since I came here 9 years ago uh which is a nice Trend uh it went down a little bit nothing significant uh since it went up so much the year prior so we're in a really good place in terms of how much we have uh to run our our uh organization so when I talk about the library I break it down into different basically buckets uh so you can understand where the money goes um three components that I'd think of are service physical plant and staff together they make up the entire place so some of those are pretty self-explanatory the numbers for staff you have in front of you um you know that's how much salaries and health insurance and Pur and so on so forth cost what portion of the budget they are and and obviously people in the building is integral to providing service which is our core uh Focus um before we get to service though just a moment to talk about the building itself uh it is a pretty big building I hope you've all spent some time inside of it it's a beautiful building if you haven't been there in a while I encourage everybody to go back in especially if you haven't been in there since the renovation it's a beautiful building it gets a decent amount of use it's old uh the original library is 1936 building it's has some challenges um and then the addition and the renovation there were still a few things that that are getting old um you know we have a slate roof slate roofs are expensive to take care of we have some uh issues with the septic that's in the basement that's been ongoing uh we've been working on that for years we have hbac systems that are old and getting older um sometimes those things break or fail uh recently it's been much more difficult to get parts from carrier to replace things that break uh or even if you find the part it's difficult to get your contractors who used to come out to come out quite as quickly or as efficiently as they used to and also uh it's important I think to note that everything is more expensive than it was uh that means a book costs more than it did uh pieces for our Machinery or our hbac system cost more than it did everything we buy costs more than it did so while it's nice to have an increase in our um Revenue relative to a bunch of years ago everything does cost more so it doesn't go quite as far as we would like it to so our primary uh obligation to the community is to provide provide service and what do I mean by that so what I mean by that is all of the things that we give to the community in terms of physical objects digital objects and space uh we still have physical materials we still have books we still have movies we still have audio books we still have music all of those things still go out okay every year I see what our circulation is our circulation for 2023 was higher than 22 which was higher than 21 which was higher than 20 we're not quite at where we were pre pandemic until you count digital circulation which uh obviously is much higher perhaps it's not obvious but it's obvious to me watching the trend because the big deciding factor for digital content was uh the was Co was the pandemic so a lot of people switched from physical media to digital media and that trend has uh persistent I'll talk a little bit more about that um but the physical items that we have on our shelves they still go out people still come in for them um we have uh a couple of additional physical materials that people can loan they may or may not be aware of it we do have a library of things which is available to Oakland residents it's exactly what it sounds like they're things they're useful items that are expensive and you might want to use once or twice but you don't want to pay for we just got a new digital photo scanner um that's really great it'll digitize a ton of photos very quickly uh and you probably don't want to have to pay for that unless you've got you know boxes and boxes of photos the library allows you to come down check it out use it for free return it and there you go uh we have a metal detector we have an outdoor screen we have a movie projector we have a couple of video game systems we have um some lawn games we have a whole bunch of tools actually diagnostic mostly nothing power nothing that's going to hurt anybody uh but diagnostic tools that are just useful um and we have a thermal camera so you can see where you have issues with your insulation stuff like that you might want to use a few times but you don't necessarily want to buy that's a great addition to our collection um we have a museum pass program I don't know if people realize this we have discounted tickets to the Museum of Natural History which can be very very expensive without those passes so I encourage people to check it out but we also have passes so that you can go for free to Guggenheim the brooken Botanical Garden the Intrepid a and Space Museum the Museum of the dog the storm king art center The Morris Museum and the museum with the moving image so um you know those are all really great uh St establishments that you can visit for free by taking out the library Museum passes um we do serve um just your as a as a permanent Art Gallery I don't know if people know that to my knowledge we're the only free public art gallery in Oakland uh we're constantly rotating in new artists they're exhibited up on the stage we usually have some information about them up on the stage as well and sometimes they have receptions uh we are wedding venue so mayor knows that um we're also just a meeting space uh I want to talk a little bit about that the meeting space is available for all residents and nonprofit organizations in Oakland free of charge that means if you want to play bridge in the library and you live in town you can and if you have a nonprofit like the scouts are constantly in there or some of the other groups in town uh they meet there you meet for free you use the space um it's a great service because it's you know a large room that you might otherwise have to rent or pay for that you can get for free they've got smart TVs in there we have free Wi-Fi all the time so people can generally use the technology pretty easily um we also have a local history room now which is finally complete it still needs to be fleshed out with the collection that it's a cool room if people are interested in that they should come and check it out uh in a few months when we have a grand opening for that we also have quiet workspaces so the library is um one of the last places uh that you can go uh and work and there is no expectation of you having to spend any money uh so I encourage people who who want to study or work from home they want to change a venue you can come to the library we do have quiet workspaces we also have not quiet Works spaces although the cell reception in the basement is terrible unfortunately it's something we can't really fix um you can work down there cooperatively in groups you can talk you can tutor you can socialize you can just have a Meeting of Minds you don't have to ask you just come in you use the space it's there while we're open and it's for everybody um we have a computer lab for people that still need it believe it or not people do still come in for the PCS um uh and we also have just to bring it back to materials because I did gloss over it so digital materials have picked up steam in the last bunch of years as I said so what does that mean that's ebooks that's downloadable audio books that's streaming TV shows that's streaming movies uh and that's music that's available digitally um some of the products names are Comics plus which is a free comic online comic uh Subscription Service it's not Marvel or DC but it's a bunch of other comic books that you can get for free on your tablet or smart device and read if you want to we have hoopla hoopla is a primarily downloadable audio but also has ebook service that will allow any Resident who has a library card 10 checkouts a month every month you download the device uh you download the item to your device and you can stream it from your Bluetooth it cost you nothing uh just to compare that to audible audible I think it's $10 a month and you get one download and then after that you have to pay so this is like way better than an audible subscription because it's free you can download all 10 at once you can keep them all on your device go wherever you want to and stream them that's right there one of the best products that we have primarily because there's never a weight for what you want so if it's there you click it you get it um the most robust product that we have for digital media is Libby Libby has tens of thousands of ebooks and audio books there is often a weit because it's shared with the Consortium however we're Advantage customers which means we buy copies just for openland residents you can line hop if you're waiting for something that's very popular anybody who's a liby user knows that even with that up there's typically a pretty long weight period sometimes as much as uh 30 days or something this year we started buying actually last year we started buying cost per C which means that if somebody in Oakland wants the item and it's available they get it without a weight and then we pay for it after the fact it means that you don't have to wait for that item you get it instantaneously not all titles are available instantaneously but when they are we always buy them because our objective is to get the public what they want as quickly as possible because we understand that a 30-day wait period is really really not something anybody's interested in um we have LinkedIn learning for those that are interested that's a free subscription where you can go online and get uh pretty good instruction on a lot of um computer programming uh python stuff like that even Excel or whatever they have a lot of uh of instruction professional instruction through Linkedin learning that's a pretty good product if you're trying to just expand your horizons and and educate yourself a little bit on the side um we also have brain fuse brain fuse has um some job help and and it has some tutoring online and it has a little bit of UM Vet help help for veterans so if anybody is interested and M is information on our website we pay for that as free for the public as well we have mangle languages for free so if you want to learn how to speak a different language you should go on our website and sign up for mangle languages and you can use that free of charge and then we have proquest and proquest will get you the New York Times The Wall Street Journal and a couple other Publications that I don't remember off the top of my head for free including today's edition the only downside to that product is it doesn't look like a newspaper but if you're looking for an article from the day you can find it with a few keyword uh searches there are a couple of other products that are available through buckles which I should mention obviously we're still a buckles member that means you get to go into any buckles library and use your card there to borrow the books that are on the Shelf if we don't have it they'll send it to us there are cost savings associated with being a buckles member um obviously we wouldn't be able to house or purchase all the books that are contained across all the buckles libraries but there's also training that they give us um they do our Network for us so we're not on same network as the burough we're on the buffles network and we have our email through them and so on and so forth and there's always training and new products being rolled out for us to use on our end through buckles so that's an important component of what we offer as well I think I hit everything uh although I always forget something oh our programming I always want to say if you're not up on what we're doing sign up for our newsletter you can do that with one click on our website we do programs for children young adults and adults every month all the time uh during the summer it really picks up I think during summer reading we had something like an average of three or four programs a day every day for two months um there's a lot to see and to do and to learn and to participate in for the youngest people all the way up into adulthood we have a spring concert series coming up I think it's five or six concerts um that are free on Sunday afternoons you know that anybody can come to if they register online and that's just part of what we're doing so if you're interested um sign up for our newsletter and then you'll be kept in breast of what's new and what's coming in and what's your website Oakland NJ library.org um I think that's most things I can go into detail if people have specific questions you know talking about the physical plan obviously we have electric costs we have gas costs the maintenance costs I talked about um I think what we try to do is to have a building that's accessible clean and comfortable and usually we get that we have a little bit of a heating issue in the basement that I will ack knowledge has been difficult to fix primarily because we're having trouble with parts and vendors getting back to us which some of my peers and other libraries are running into similar problems but uh I do I'm confident that we'll we will get it addressed um otherwise I think I've gotten everything I might talk a little bit about evolution of the organization uh every industry is probably still in a transitional phase since the pandemic I know we had to change how we do things some of those changes were for the better um but but now we're trying to be forward looking something we're working on right now is we have a maker space but it's not a legitimate maker space and that it doesn't offer the type of technology that we would really like to offer the public so a more comprehensive 3D printing program right now we have a 3D printer that's very difficult to use we'd like to get some better ones put them with the computer pair them in a in a location where the public can come in and take better advantage of that some more highend computer classes that we'd like to be able to teach in an instructional environment it's difficult to do right now with our layout um um things like that uh trying to push things forward so we're looking towards getting another facility another room within our facility just for that maybe this year maybe next year um that's something that we're working on internally um as a library so uh I know that was a lot of words really quickly but um if anybody has any specific questions about anything just uh you mentioned buckles I remember a couple years buckles was having there were issues like it like they thought maybe was going to go away or or you know buckles is is solid buckles is strong it won't go anywhere okay it's a good I mean it still functions it it is a better organization now than it was before the pandemic primarily because we built our own delivery system for books so people who are longtime Library users will remember waiting 10 to 14 days for a book to come and that's because we use the Free State system which still exists and still takes 10 to 14 days to catch your materials we built our own in response to the breakdown of that system that now will get you sometimes next day the item that you want it is a way better system so for those of you at home who remember the old way it's a lot faster it's a lot more efficient and if you're not sure that you want to come back come back and I think you'll be really surprised by that among other things but no buckles is in a good place hang on let me see if I understand this you're doing it better than the state we are shock I'll make that old claim we are I'd like to congratulate you what a wonderful service you have for the residents of Oakland and I know it's in part due to your tutelage and thank you I appreciate that and your supervision but thank you thank you just one quick question are there grants specific to the library that you take yes that's my next question yes and I've gone out for a few of them unfortunately the last two I I wrote for I didn't get and they were Tech ones um and they're pretty competitive and I keep trying I'll probably try again this year why didn't we get them as there something is it they know they didn't tell me they didn't actually tell me they just said I didn't meet the uh criteria but um it was to get I wanted to build a mobile computer lab that we could bring actually to the rec Camp believe it or not to maybe use um you know pull some of the kids out into a classroom during the course of the day and I do coding with them or whatever and you know of course so what we would need would be Chromebooks that are set up to be centrally managed that sort of thing so that we could you know set them up deploy them but have them be controlled and then we could take some groups of kids out of the rec Camp if possible so they can go in the library or that we can come down there and use the dny D Building or whatever but it never it never actually did not get the funding so they did not well maybe if we get our grant writer we could help them well that was a question I'm trying to figure out what it was was it location demographics income possibly yeah what was the what was the criteria that undoubtedly a contributor because I write pretty well but um I don't think it was my wri name but but yeah so I mean I could go back and look but yes I i' I've gone out I have none to date but I'll I keep looking for there is there's never anything I will tell you that when my my biggest problem has been our biggest problem has been the hbac system is older it's getting older we have an old boiler too and nobody wants to touch those really big units you know we had somebody come through and and they were going to make Place more energy efficient they going to replace units but the large large air conditioning units nobody wants to do those on a grant or didn't we replace something about 5 years ago you replace one and then shortly thereafter we replaced one believe it or not um and now we have one old unit that's remaining the thing is that it's still that's where the heater is broken so it still cools it doesn't heat we're trying to get just the coil replaced it's difficult to find the part um it's difficult to find somebody who really wants to do that work and also they need it's expensive so they need to either be on government contract or um we have to go out to bid which yeah um you know FES the process I said just just as a contractor the the the state makes it harder and harder to to to be a a registered contractor every year there's more forms that have to be filled out and so fewer and fewer contractors are are are are doing it because they just don't want to do the paperwork yeah so yeah that's bad news yeah anybody else anything El it no thank you all right thank you great overview uh and last but certainly not least we have Neil malid and Mike wo from uh Recreation committee uh are going to come up and talk about their budget programs and uh plans for this year hello Mike welcome oh you could be up by 7:30 I was hello where should we start tell us with the program what's going on Recreation Recreation we run Youth and adult uh recreational activities for the town mhm we also we do bring in a couple of people from other towns who may not have a program such as roller hockey they'll come and they they'll play you know in our program um what we do uh for adults we actually do have quite a few adult programs uh we we partner with the men's adult softball couple a couple nights a week they they play in the summertime we have volleyball we have a a street hockey program for adults you have a basketball program for adults um M bike mountain bik mountain bike Mountain yeah mountain bikes mixed but mountain bikes have been kind of like like in uh limbo State for the past couple Cycles so with with the kids with the youth programs we have um you see that down the red field all the time you see them in the gym all the time all the different programs I mean and we're always adding and not only we adding but the program is getting bigger and bigger I don't know if there's more kids more people come in and do multiple sports but it's it's just absolutely just expanding and with that our wrestling program just completely went through the roof we had a complete change over with our wrestling program this past year we didn't know what was going to happen we we brought in Austin wall as our uh as our wrestling commissioner if anybody knows Austin Well Austin is Mr Wrestling New Jersey state champ you wrestled D1 at UNC he has his own facility here he's really mean Indian Hills he's really so he bringing him in was was a huge thing plus he's an entrepreneur so I like bringing those type of people into the commission we said you may have to start off a little you may you may have to start all over have to start low we about 72 75 people last year just the opposite it it just exploded we had 125 kids this year wow and it was just it just incredible wrestle yeah just wrestling just and it just exploded cuz you know Austin is that type of person Austin created a great program there great parents great coaches involved with it and just completely grew and he had to with that number wrong we had to buy more singlet for the kids we completely revamped the Indian Hills which we share with them in wrestling we revamped their their uh wrestling room we put in brand new mat those Matt for theirs and it's like the late 1990s so for dried it was more mess parents didn't like them read the whole I mean that program is just completely exploded and one thing is I the commission itself is only Dan Bob and I are the only kind of like Old-Timers there everybody else is pretty new what happened during covid is uh we we ran the programs we really the like one of the only towns that ran all our programs except wrestling cuz you couldn't and our summer camp program and we and I think because of that and it was so difficult we lost a lot of those Commissioners because it was it was just brutal it was just I wanted to qu several times when you were my my my I thought I want I want it out I just had had it what was going on we dragged you back in when I thought I was out and um but this new group I have right now of Commissioners are just phenomenal I mean five about five of us are are consider you would consider small business owners and entrepreneurs which is great because someone who's a small business owner your your paycheck for tomorrow isn't guaranteed so they're used to dealing it scrambling and making budgets and and fundraising we fundrais like like like incredible Austin and Steve Calo kind of compete like who can raise more money on the banners yeah yeah the banner money and we have so many other things are just going on tournaments it's just mean we sent our teams to coopertown when I went to coopertown back in 2008 um we had to raise like maybe a$1 th000 a kid and the coaches and the parents didn't have to pay now it's they're raising like 45 $50,000 a year you see the with the MMS and car wash all these different things that they do so the programs itself are really strong really healthy and as you look at the budget you see we've gone from about $450,000 up to about 750 and just just also a couple of capital projects we're doing we're actually going to be putting a new playground we've had some really high level meetings uh with engineering and and Rich and DW you I'm going to redo that that playground that way playground is about 10 12 years old it's time to be redone and uh so we're going to apply for a grant hopefully that give us at least half that money and going try to raise the other half and it's going to be colorful it's going to be new it's going to be new apparatus we put those little um umbrellas umbrellas over the top so the parents won't have to get on another complaint I get we redid Fields 5 and9 in the fall we're going to redo we actually have a meeting tomorrow morning uh redo the Three softball fields as well as get field8 done and um I said with wrestling room has been done the tennis courts we we're going to be it's a priority to get it done all right so we're going to get that done shooting field lights we hope to have done soon um but the field was just redone the field was just redone against yeah we we we what we've worked with Recreation so we've worked with um one of those you don't have to go to bid for them what they the state state contract company so we able to go right Co-op contract Co-op contract we able to go right right ahead and meet with them and that's this folks we're meeting with tomorrow morning uh Dan stepen I and DPW as well meeting with them those other fields that um and uh and again those things are being done without taxpayer dollars grants fundraising trust money and uh and the oh the the parade is June 1st I know you said you don't want to throw out a first pitch you want to do something else but whatever you want to do you have your moment and June 8th is going to be the Pavilion opening at uh Gro Park P yeah pavil we have to say Pavilion I it's because the whole Facebook you know nclat June 8th June 8th yeah we do a good job partnering with the Chamber of Commerce the Chamber of Commerce is purchasing um most of our baseball and softball uniforms this year for rec which is really helping us the chamber the chamber y really yeah which allowed us to reduce fees and those two sports okay and they and if this works well we're going to hit soccer we're going to hit B we're going to do anything we could do to save money as I said in the past it's very we know I know when the parents call me they have a hard time making that checkup they can't afford it but if we can do things to kind of bring that back with all that fundraising with with doing this type of stuff it's phenomenal we we partner obviously with the public events with the uh with the baseball parade the softball parade um the SEO we obviously partner with there our fundraising arm and our uh basically is our fund our 501c3 fundraising arm J focer is a phenomenal job with as well as Katrina who's the treasurer everybody else who does a great job with that and um we also may be working with partnering possibly with someone to do like an after summer camp program to to take care of the kids when Once the camp and like an after care type of thing and more than after care but more like like like a continuation like a continuation prr we're still in the works with them as for summer camp last year we were back after covid this year we are really back I mean the programs that Emily has put together for summer camp this year is just tremendous I mean it just that's your largest increase right yes yes yes most had salary cost minum wage went up was killing it the wages went up and also because she's had almost 100 kid increase in the summer in open Camp from last year wow she's got to she is hoping to hire another 22 counselors which generates more than 50% of the increase that we were requesting again which ultimately caused us to raise the fees for the summer camp I mean big thing ra still a great deal yeah it's it's a phenomenal deal and the great big thing raising we used have to we used to pay the junior campers about $6 an hour but the state law Chang and we have to give them morg $15 an hour raising the minimum wage sounds like idea but now you're paying for it someone has to pay for it yeah it doesn't grow up in trees from $80 a week to $ we right 14y old kids who carry water around making $15 an hour so they do a great job is there an age limit on I'm available you need your working papers do the papers for it's a phenomenal program the parents are highly supportive the parents it's a volunteer program as as most people here have coached in our program and still coach in our program and gr it's really it's Grassroots it's it's parents and it works up their way to directors then it works way up and Commissioners are the and I'm the last I just basically watch from 30,000 fet and just see every a great job the phenomenal Commissioners I just cannot say how great these all of them are they just do a phenomenal job is actually for the first time in a long time we all get along like it all gets along and we because everybody's pulling in the same direction I'm passing pull the same direction but it's just that we just have a great group that's all pulling in the same direction right now we're past this whole Co nonsense that went on caused a lot of irritation it was was horrible you WR it was just it was just a very difficult time but we wanted to put the programs on and we didn't and um we're slowly catching we we've we've pretty much reached the attendance and the registrations that we had pre so what is it 2019 M um you know that that's some so yes it it did I mean we in all sports we roughly had about 11 12% increase in registrations roughly about yes from last year about 380 to 400 increase overall wow in the program wow um which also accounts for some of the increases that we're requesting in the budget which now will be trust and just to emphasize to everybody we're a zerob based budget we can't spend what we don't collect especially now under the new system with the trust that's been explained to us and all the Commissioners do you want to go over this slide you want to go over this thing just just before he starts going to be he's want to do number it's not me just just so it's also understood too with inflation we got zap last year big time you know cost of goods when we do crazy so so that's basic it's no one's making money here just we're working on we're doing our fundraise we're trying to do things to try to keep things down but there are some costs I I it looks like when you look at our increase from last year that we're going up almost 33% which sounds outrageous but again a lot of that is due to the increase in the number of registrations so we now have to buy uniforms and equipment for more for more kids so that contributes I mean the biggest is is the summer camp um we're now funding we're going to have a full-time assistant uh working for us to do our paperwork for the rec department that now needs to be funded so everybody's signup fee had to be increased $10 to help us cover that administrative cost roughly out of every sign up we're going to be re taking out before somebody can spend on the program $20 for administration $8 for the cap fee which help helps us maintain the fields that we all utilize and help us you know rebuild them um and insurance and that has gone up um we're now our summer working with the high school we've now uh working with a lot of the coaches at Indian Hills I'm one of them um providing summer camps they now have to go out and purchase liability insurance it's no longer the responsibility of the borrow so that's an added cost that comes on to some of the sign up fees and that's the explanation well if some of the people ask why are we paying more that's the reason so anybody else have any questions do you expect to grow again like last year or you think last year was the anomaly will just grow incrementally going forward I think be incremental but unless we add some more programs I mean some of the like we we added um a couple more camps that's couple more summer Sports Camps so that causes it to to kind of grow a little B more and those are new so we don't have you could be one it could be 100 yeah exactly this is really this is not you know this is a lot of times this we'll see what's happen because we don't really know who's going to how we going to sign up mean like for example in softball because that's where I coach I mean I just contacted Rosa I had budgeted for 182 kids we're already at 183 with another 3 weeks to go before our season starts and we all know everyone signs up right before the money but as you say it's a nice problem to have yes correct they have access and and now with with the trust we can deal with it we don't have to worry about how we can pay for this now it's you can use all those funds I I just want to say something real quick I was talking one a couple of a mayor or something they were asking about a Rec program and they're like who's your Rec director and I said we don't have a Rec director this is a volunteer program and they couldn't believe you know that still working with all the volunteers pulling together with the success of our program so I just want to compliment all the commission all you thank you how how's it working with the the new ad and and and schools in general at the high school very well I mean I I had a good relationship with Lorenzo we have a better one with John because he's really trying to make some big change I think what this new football coach is bringing is is going to make those changes I mean we're constantly we're constantly always pulling the we can take people to the door but they have to bring them in and we just kept felt like we bring them to the door and except for some program like softball but now I think with the new football coach I think that's we're thinking that's going to be the start the start really was John coming in John Duncan coming in as a new ad and now we're feeling that with um with the new football coach because he's not he's not just some regular guy he's a superstar from from from you know from St Joe's he's he's going so hopefully he can bring that around and let's hope you know that usually floods in some more but one thing happens like with Ramapo when they would take kids that they take the Superstar and they take the Superstar as friends and it leaves in Hills yeah you lose a football player that plays basketball wrest and wrest you lose yeah so hopefully that that will help kind of bring in um the floodgates back back home the HS we have a great legend of the like I said we share the wrestling gyms we use the basketball we older coaches coach with us um we they use our Fields I mean we have this great relationship with Indian Hills right and we use their fields as well like for example some of the baseball teams are using the turf field because you know really can't get on the dirt Fields with the rain and all that so everything's been working well both ways and this year the the basketball kids uh coach was great that was that was my my son was a part of that that was really great yeah great so we were trying I mean but he's doing he's doing a great job he's really a lot of energy came with a lot of energy all right that's good to hear anybody else questions great job very much guys Y what more do you need from us um the trust was well say tenis courts and the uh the Truman lights okay thank you thank you does anybody else have any further business uh just two minutes I promise I'll be that's what you said before 45 minutes later um well you know David and I were talking about how long we thought our part of the presentation was going to take and we figured about 45 minutes and it was an hour and 15 and I think that was cuz Pat spoke for half an hour wow um somebody's got to take it in the neck yeah um I just wanted to talk a little bit about process while we're all here uh so we have another meeting scheduled on Wednesday uh it looks like we'll we'll be in a position to introduce at the second meeting in March which would put us on track for the public hearing and Adoption of the budget at the second meeting in April the same schedule we've used for the past over many years maybe not Co maybe not 2020 off a little bit but pretty much that's the uh sort of the standard uh timing of everything so if after Wednesday you're looking at these budget materials uh you feel the need to have any uh more in-depth meetings where you have questions about things please reach out to David and I or we can another meeting as you know you deem fit uh and you know because we'll have a some time there uh prior to uh the week before the second council meeting in March when we have to prepare everything for introduction I think this is helpful having it here tonight or else we would have had that do it during the during the council meeting which meant we would go to 10:00 at night I think this is a good practice because now it's online people have budget questions it's not crammed into a meeting they can go directly to YouTube it's being filmed and look at the information online and Mr K could just tease us who's going to be here next week testify uh Wednesday night we're going to have uh DPW we're going to have DPW uh police department and fire department it starts at 6:30 starts at 6:30 well they don't spend any money so we're fine and then I I will come to the meeting but I'll probably leave early cuz I have a basketball game my son play yeah yeah yeah yeah he made it yeah oh good okay any further business I think you turn the meeting business next meetting will be Wednesday 6:30 motion some move so move all favor any thank you every so Dave when are you uh