Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey folks, this is your town manager Alex Torpey here with a bit of a late update for December, a happy new year, and an update for January 2024. How it's 2024 already, I have no idea, but we'll have to save that for a different podcast, though. A lot's been happening in the last month or two, though. A lot of that is really on the staff side, both working on turning the data and feedback from our retention and recruitment study into proposals and then budgeting them out and working with our collective bargaining units and staff and the select board to move forward on all of that. So we're ready for the budget, and with a couple persistent vacancies and some key positions, we've all been a bit flat out. And it will probably be like that until we get the budget adopted by the select board, at least in March. So here's a little bit of what we covered in our meetings in December and January.
[00:00:50] We discussed some budget, finance and audit updates, which I'll come back to with an update summary. As of late January, we held the final public hearings and finished some cleanup on a bunch of easements that had been sort of floating around some for many years. Using the RSA 40 114, a process that was approved at town meeting last year, we discussed and the select board, as well as the planning board, reviewed and sent letters to the state legislature and some other stakeholders regarding the religious use exemption state statute that's become a topic in Hanover and elsewhere. We discussed some election requirements for the primary appointed volunteers, and then we had our primary election on January 23. I'll link to the results there.
[00:01:38] We completed a bunch of other logistical kind of business which you can find online if so interested. I'm not going to go into all the details here because there's a lot to cover. This includes setting the 2024 calendar, approving minutes, accepting donations, unanticipated revenues, banner requests, things like that. We also did finally grant the tax exemption to the Friends of Hanover crew, so if anybody was tracking that, they did update their bylaws to be in compliance with the advice that our attorney gave us as what was needed for the town to be able to grant such exemptions. We did a proclamation for a retiring employee and plus my town report. So I'm going to pick some things out from each of the December and January ones to cover.
[00:02:22] So we're going to talk a little bit about some upcoming events and activities, human resources and personnel updates, transportation and mobility, some things in the downtown, and then I'll give a little bit more on a couple of the bigger topics here.
[00:02:40] And so why don't we jump into some of the bigger topics to start? And so probably the two that I'll start with here are kind of budget and finance updates.
[00:02:50] Those are pretty important, and we're getting into a time when there's a lot going on. So if you're curious, there are two different memos that were provided for the January 22 select board meeting from Ellen, our finance and admin services director, and myself. One of those memos is on the budget, and one was on the FY 22 audit. So if you'd like to read those, I do have links to those. I'm going to summarize them quickly here.
[00:03:20] So the first, which is just sort of crazy to reflect on, which is that, as we were discussing this on the 22nd, one year prior, Ellen actually was not even here yet. So we had been without a finance director for several months, which really complicated last year's budgeting process. But with Ellen on board, we are working on a lot of historical issues and really getting to a much better place than we have been for a long time. So a couple things that we wanted to sort of highlight. One is just that many of the goals that we, or at least some of the goals that we set out for this year's budget process, we're probably not going to be able to do. So we talked last year about a lot of structural reorganizations of things and some of those things looking at which funds we have and why.
[00:04:09] We had a lot of discussion about the general fund versus fire fund versus ambulance fund. And should those be in three separate or not, where we were all sort of leaning towards? Probably not, but there's things like that that we just don't have the time to do this year and aren't really the highest priority. The next is we're trying to kind of continue to improve the documentation that we create both for the select board, for the finance committee, and for the public, and really trying to do a dual track presentation of information, one which is to provide summary level and simplified things for people who aren't going super far down into the weeds, but also to provide the backup data and a lot of the details for people, for select board and finance committee, for example, or anybody else that wants to really go down into that. But we always try to provide with these sort of things two different tracks so that you're not giving too little information to people who want more and too much information for people who don't want all of that. So, for example, we will be releasing again for the second year an excel spreadsheet of the budget online, which is basically the document that we're using to do the budget on our side. And we're going to break that out into different department tabs. So it's going to be a little bit easier to follow and read with some summary information and some department specific information versus last year's, where everything was really on one page.
[00:05:32] And a lot of the documentation has also been looking at how things go to. Actually, I'll come back to the capital in just a moment.
[00:05:45] As everybody's listening to this, I'm sure knows we spent a considerable amount of time, more than 60 meetings over six months and a number of surveys, meeting with our staff last year, collecting feedback, working with consultants on understanding some of the issues, with the way a lot of our personnel policies are set up and whether our pay is competitive as it should be and all this sort of stuff. So we've been spending a ton of time in the last couple of months working on that and kind of translating a lot of the ideas and feedback that we got from those meetings into policy proposals and costing those out and talking with the right stakeholders to fine tune things, figure out what we can do this year, what we want to put off for future years. So we're really getting into the kind of last few weeks or month of figuring out a lot of these ideas that will be incorporated and discussed, sort of highlighted in the budget. So it'll be very clear some of the changes that we're proposing to make, many of which are really important and some of which are long overdue. But personnel costs make up more than two thirds of the budget, and so this is a big chunk of things related to that. We've also begun having conversations with our three collective bargaining units. All of them need to have contracts. All the contracts expire this year, so we have to renegotiate each of those as well.
[00:07:11] And we're approaching that in a very sort of different process this time around, much more kind of collaborative and interactive, where we're creating some of the solutions with them, along with the nonunion departments and staff as well. So we are optimistic that we're going to find some areas there with some of the changes that we want to make to compensation.
[00:07:37] We're confident that we're going to find some areas that really help move the ball forward.
[00:07:42] We've also been supporting the new capital improvement program committee, which, as you may know, something that is required to be in place unless the planning board does the capital budget, which they don't do here. So that was something we did have to create. And it's also beneficial because it creates a sort of multistakeholder environment where some of the projects, especially some of the things that historically have never been budgeted or discussed as part of a budget process before, which, for example, you'll see includes things like a lot of recreation facilities, have just never been a part of the budget process.
[00:08:15] And so there's a lot of costs on the table that we don't know. And bringing the different stakeholders together and including on the staff side, but also on the CIPC side, so that we're bringing know outside. We appointed a number of people to that committee that brings in different perspectives. And so that's been also a tough process because we running a couple weeks behind. So they don't have a ton of time to review everything. But there's a lot of new projects that are being identified, especially with the new master plan. So that's a really important process. And on the capital side, that can often be really big discretionary budget items. Discretionary meaning different than a personnel cost, where unless you're reducing services, which is not something that's on the table here, actually, we're looking at expanding some services in some key areas where you don't have a lot of discretion over those staffing costs. Healthcare costs are fixed, et cetera, whereas capital and what you decide to fund or not fund and whether it's self funded or done through bond issues, those can have really, really big impacts on the budget. So it's really important that we spend the time talking about these things and making sure that we are fleshing out all of the costs that are already on the table to maintain facilities, services as they are, but also to talk about areas where we think that there's some expansion of services that might be needed based on community feedback is what's come up in the master plan or elsewhere. I've also been coordinating with the finance committee on a number of these things. So Ellen and I did meet with them last week, January 25, and they are going to be again, a helpful part of the budget process by providing feedback, giving us advice on how to approach some things and reviewing some of the details and just overall being another set of eyes, especially with Ellen and I being new.
[00:10:07] The last piece, which I'll talk more about in a minute, is the fiscal year 22 audit. And actually, I'll just kind of come back to that because I'm going to talk about that in a little bit. More detail.
[00:10:17] So, on the budget process, folks should just be aware that the last week in February, we do have budget meetings where a bunch of different elements of our department budgets will be presented. That's sort of the first draft of the budget. And that is. Let's see, that's February 26, 27th, and 20 eigth. And those typically start at 06:00 p.m. We're going to be placing a lot of that information online as well. And then the goal is to present a first draft of the budget in those meetings, along with some department kind of updates. And then we have select board meetings on March 11 and March 18, March 11 being the one that we're targeting to actually adopt the budget on the select board side so we can get it moved off town meeting. And if we can't do it on the 11th, we'll do it on the 18th. And that's really drop dead date that we have to have everything done.
[00:11:11] So keep an eye out. We'll definitely be posting information on the podcast about the budget. And again, we're going to try and provide things in such a way that there's both kind of simple and detailed explanations for folks. Okay.
[00:11:22] And that's the FY 25 budget. Now, we also have just completed the FY 22 budget, and if that sounds a little out of date, that is correct. It is. That's for fiscal year 2021, 2022. A lot of work had to be done to get that audit complete.
[00:11:43] There were a number of things that I'll talk about in a moment that were negative findings on that audit that we expect to largely repeat in the FY 23 audit. And again, that's for fiscal year 22 23.
[00:11:59] And then we expect many, if not all, of those issues to be cleared up in the FY 24 audit, which is the first one that Ellen and I will have been here for the whole time. That's this fiscal year, the one that's ending in June.
[00:12:15] So you can find the memo that Ellen and I wrote to the select board and the finance committee in a link in the show notes. But there are a couple different things that are important to note, which is that there were four adverse opinions and two material weaknesses in the audit. And I don't think I'm going to get too far down into the weeds here because it can get a little technical, and that might be best to head to that memo if you want to read a little bit more about it. But those are relatively serious. Ellen has never had either of those marks on an audit that she's completed throughout her career. And I am fairly certain, though I could be wrong, that in any of the three other towns that I've worked in full time, I've never had one of these either. Often notes on an audit and considerations, but not an adverse opinion or a material weakness, which does point to serious problems. Now, we've been talking about those things for months and months in select board meetings, that there are areas where we really need to improve internal controls, reporting, and process related improvements. But also actually, there's been errors that have been made in the past, one of which luckily actually broke in our favor, which is rare, and we'll be happy to sort of take.
[00:13:39] And that one actually provides an additional about $690,000 in our undesignated fund balance that we did not think was there. So that's a plus. But the material weaknesses, which have to do with general ledger maintenance and balance sheet reconciliations and capital project tracking and grant maintenance, are relatively serious.
[00:14:04] And the adverse opinions are also relatively narrow, which is really about the capital assets. As we've talked about, there's been multiple transitions in the finance department in Hanover that have partially led to some of these, or largely led to some of these issues, which was two finance director transitions where there really wasn't a transition that took place, and one transition of the finance accounting manager, where, again, a transition really didn't happen. So you've heard me talk about the importance of succession planning and knowledge management before, and those things did not happen the way that they should in those processes. So some processes, some documentation was lost.
[00:14:44] And Ellen has spoken to this at our meetings, and our auditors have been very clear about this. We do not think that anything actually has been done with any malice. There's not any indication of money missing or anything like that. The auditors have been very clear about that. And again, so has Ellen in her review of all of this. But it's a lot of process changes that need to happen, and a lot of documentation that had to be put together, years of financial documents had to be gone through to put every, to rebuild, a lot of stuff to get the audit complete. Now, the benefit there a was that we found that error that broke in our favor. But also that means that the FY 23 audit, which is last year's budget, is going to be much easier to do because a lot of that legwork that we did for the FY 22 audit is done. And so that sort of goes forward into future year audits, which will be much easier. So if you want to look at a little bit more about that, you can head to the website.
[00:15:51] We are also providing some information about some of the corrective action steps that need to be taken for the different areas that were identified in the audit as a problem.
[00:16:04] Again, Ellen and I have been talking about this. This hasn't come at a surprise to any of us. We've been working on these issues for many months. We've been sharing with the select board, with the finance committee, with the public, that there are a number of areas that we really need to work on internally. And that's where a lot of our focus has been, and a lot of Ellen's focus has been since coming on board a year ago. So we've got plenty more to do there and you'll hear more about it, especially in terms of process improvements, documentation improvements, and a couple other areas. So again, you can look at the link for a little bit more information about that.
[00:16:38] Okay, next is the religious use exemption letter that the select board and the planning board considered. So this is related to RSA 674 76, religious use of land and structures. This bill was intended to create equity between all types of uses, like non religious uses and religious uses.
[00:17:04] Unfortunately, it seems to have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction and basically exempted religious institutions or organizations from almost all local land use regulations that everybody else has to comply with. So it created an inequity when the attempt was to create equity. We have sent a letter that you can find a link to in the show notes. The planning board sent letters to NHMA, to the state legislature to encourage them to sort of redraw those boundaries and treat all institutions the same, rather than carving out one group and saying they don't have to comply with certain regulations. So that was sent out.
[00:17:49] We don't know what the plan there is, but I know that's a major issue in Hanover and other communities as well. A lot of these local zoning and other regulations are made through a very interactive and intensive process with members of the public and technical experts to manage things like stormwater or traffic or lighting.
[00:18:09] And those are really important.
[00:18:13] Okay, so moving on.
[00:18:17] So our primary election was on last week, the 23rd, January 23, and there are results posted on our website, and I have a link to that. It's a little easier than I think, reading through everything because I've still got a bunch to cover here. So if you want to look at any more numbers versus just who won or who lost, the write ins, all that kind of stuff, you can click that link and find more information about it. But I want to thank all of our election officials and our election volunteers for the amount of time that it takes to pull off the elections. And this is just the first of four or five this year, so they're going to be really busy this year. And, of course, there's a lot of scrutiny and eyeballs kind of on our election process, as there generally should be. But they are under a lot of a microscope. And fortunately, we have really professional and well organized staff and volunteers that work well with the state and the secretary of state. So we feel confident going into this year that we are set up for success.
[00:19:19] So, moving on to a couple things that were in my reports for December and January. So upcoming events and activities, I just wanted to make sure to mention. I think most folks have heard at this point that through a really nice collaboration with Dartmouth College, the ice rink on the green is back open. And it is open to the public. So I know it was open for a week or two, and I just saw it the other day and it was closed again because the weather was too warm. So keep an eye on that. Parks and rec posts typically on instagram. What's happening? I think there's a Dartmouth account that might be sharing some stuff, too, or just go check it out. I mean, if it's warm out and it's raining, it's probably not open. But if it's colder out, head on down. And there's a little bit more information if you want to hear about that, from some of the folks from the town and the college that were involved in putting that back together, there is a podcast episode, a short one, a few episodes back, with a few people about that. And just remember, when it's open, it's open during the day. You've got to bring your own skates and everything as well.
[00:20:22] Okay, moving on to human resources updates.
[00:20:26] And so in December, we had three employees leave and two employees start employment. And in January, I believe we had one employee leave and two employees start one, which was seasonal. So we welcome the new folks to the team, and we've got a bunch of other HR related updates of things that are sort of happening right now.
[00:20:58] So the first is our retention and recruitment study, which I've just talked about a little bit a moment ago.
[00:21:05] And I guess there's not much more that I need to say there other than that we're working with all those stakeholders on again, turning a lot of the feedback, a tremendous amount of feedback, and really good feedback from last year's meetings into actual policy proposals and fixes to some of those issues.
[00:21:24] We also have our fire chief job posted. We're going through the interview process. We are bringing in a company MRI that does something called an assessment center that has been used by many public safety agencies, including in Hanover, for years.
[00:21:41] They do a very rigorous and sort of evidence driven promotion process, like in police, for example. And we want you to apply that same rigor to the fire chief process here. So we've been screening candidates and then we're moving into that process. We're running a little bit behind and so unlikely that we're going to have somebody ready by April to start, but probably by May next, is that we have now implemented flexible schedules with our staff.
[00:22:10] What this means is a couple of important things about this. So one is that it doesn't change any of the hours to the public for accessing any town services. This was a discussion that we had. There's a bunch of different ways to do flexible schedules and a lot of different models out there. The one that most departments were interested in doing, and that was certainly the easiest to do in the short term, is one where within a department, staff have the flexibility to change their schedule. So, for example, if there's a multipurson department, you might have half of the staff take off every Monday and half take off every Friday, meaning that the office is open the same number of hours, but the employees within the office are only working four day work weeks. A lot of feedback from staff, that was something that people were interested in, that sort of shift schedule that allows people some time during the work week where they aren't scheduled for work, which is really important to allow people take a little bit of pressure off people's lives. The ability to go to the doctor, go to the know, do things that are only open during the day, that is increasingly important and increasingly a priority in retention and recruitment efforts. Many other communities around here offer that. Lebanon, which is one of our kind of biggest competitors from an employment standpoint, though one of our greatest friends working together on many issues, they have a four day work week for virtually all of their staff, where most of their staff have off all day Friday. And so we need to kind of keep competitive with that.
[00:23:40] That sort of flexible shift type schedule is in place now and again, that doesn't change any of the access to services from the public. That may be different in the future. We may look at different ways to flex the schedules or different summer hours, but for now, again, this was the easiest way to sort of get some of the benefits of it. While not interrupting or disrupting or having to look at more detail at how services were available to the public or not. Next, we've got a bunch of really nice sort of positive feedback from folks about different staff and departments. So I wanted to read those out here briefly. One was we had gotten a bunch of letters from people thanking Doris Yates, our community nurse, for the work that she does. So did want to pass that along to the select board and thank her for everything that she does as our community nurse. The Hanover police also had a milestone award ceremony, which they do annually to thank their staff.
[00:24:33] This is where they do the formal swearings in and promotions, outstanding service awards and things like that. And so there's a bunch of different awards here, and I would encourage you, if you're curious, I did post about it on instagram, did read it out during the meeting. And you can find that in the agenda for all the names of all the different awards that different staff won. So we congratulate each of them and thank the Hanover Police Department for all of that.
[00:25:02] Next is our wastewater staff were recognized by the EPA by winning the 2023 Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant Operation and Maintenance Excellent Award. They were nominated by the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. And this award recognizes staff for consistently adhering to the very strict guidelines for the operations and maintenance of the facility and in doing so to help protect human and environmental health. So a thank you to our wastewater department and staff as. Okay. Next in my report was an update from our fourth quarter traffic safety staff meeting. First on that agenda was our escooter ordinance. This is meant to help improve. The regulations are a little all over the place as far as bikes and ebikes and vehicles and scooters. And so we're trying to clean that up and have a better ordinance in place, especially as it applies to in the downtown where we've had some issues with different vehicles in different areas, like on the sidewalks.
[00:26:06] As we were reviewing some of that and with our attorney, we found some other pieces of our ordinance that were updated or outdated in traffic safety related areas. So we're sending that off to our attorney. We're kind of zooming out for a second and making sure that we're doing this the right way and putting something in place that won't add one more piece, but will actually consolidate a few things into one organized ordinance because of just a lack of staff capacity. We're hoping to get that done by the spring, but that's looking like a quarter two discussion, not a quarter one, just based on everything else that we're working on.
[00:26:39] The next was questions about Verona Avenue sidewalk and that there was money, $33,000 approved in fiscal year 21 to make pedestrian improvements on Verona Ave.
[00:26:52] That is not enough to do a mup, a multi use path, but it is enough to do a sidewalk. So staff is going to recommend that Hanover bike walk and local residents meet, talk about the project scope, discuss some of the details. But depending on where we land with capital, this could be something funded in next year's budget or the following years, depending on what else is out there.
[00:27:13] There was also a couple prior issues that we wanted to follow up on that we kind of lumped together. One is on Dunster, the crosswalk request that New Hampshire DoT is reviewing that we don't expect them to fund the project. And so what we're doing is looking at taking. We had talked with the select board about holding $30,000 of sidewalk repair money that we may not need if we are going to redo Main street and using that to purchase the flashing beacons and redo that ourselves, if the state will allow it, even if they don't pay for it. Aetna speeding, we're going to be likely requesting to purchase speed feedback devices. In the meantime, we are going to continue to do targeted enforcement. We're still awaiting the NHDOT's response to that, too. And then on the capacity and staffing side, we do have a little bit of an update there. We've basically just identified that we don't really have a mechanism for being more coordinated and proactive here. Right now this is falling on a whole bunch of senior staff's plates, myself, our planning director, our police chief and captain, our public works director.
[00:28:18] And we'd like to figure out a better way to sort of coordinate a lot of department head time that is being taken just to sort of intake these and coordinate them. And what we are landing on is kind of a two part plan. One is reorganizing a couple of positions internally that we're not quite ready to talk about publicly yet. We're still working with some of the staff on that. Not huge changes, but just to get a little bit of extra time in a couple of departments to connect some of these dots. And then also working more closely with our regional planning commission, who is going to be providing weekly time to advise us on these issues, to take sort of ownership of coordinating some of them. So this is a really nice collaboration because we already work with them in a lot of different areas and we'll see at a pretty low cost we'll see how much more we get and what the value is like, and that will help us make some decisions about how we may or may not want to fund increasing this capacity going forward. But the short story is that if we want to continue to do the kind of transportation and mobility projects that have really become a higher priority in the recent years and is becoming an even higher priority in the new master plan, we just don't have the staff capacity to do that. For example, I'll use Rob Houseman, our planning director, as an example. There's nowhere in his job description that mentions working on transportation. So we're all sort of pitching in, which is really great, but we need to set this up a little bit better to be a little bit more centralized and coordinated going forward if we really want this to be such a high priority as it is, which I think all of us agree that it should be. So we've got a little bit more to be done there, but I'm feeling pretty optimistic that we will be going in the right direction. We also talked a little bit about the west wheelock crossing and bridge.
[00:30:07] Basically, we want to encourage NHDOT. The short story here is to make whatever they do on the bridge at the end of that construction project more bike friendly. It's kind of laid out a little weird right now, though. That's mostly just because they're not doing work over the winter. So we're going to ask them to do temporary painting instead of thermoplastic. So that allows us to take the paint off when the west wheelock project is completed, which is going to be a couple years from now. But basically, or I should say as projects on West Wheelock get completed, that basically what happens on west wheelock and the changes that we expect to be made there will be consistent with the painting and layout of the bridge. It would be nice for those two to be the same and for both of those to create more bike access and more pedestrian access.
[00:30:58] So we're going to be working on that as well. And then the Girlbrook multi use path, pending the NHDOT approval of the respondent to an RFQ that we issued, we'll be moving ahead with that project to create a multi use path between reservoir road and Verona, downtown Hanover. I mentioned the skating rink, so that's exciting. We do have a new business which is right on Main street where the former canoe club was. This is the works cafe.
[00:31:24] Definitely worth checking out. Love seeing new businesses open and it's been pretty busy every time I have stopped in there, which is great. We also did this really great star project, starry night, that you may have noticed all around town. That's Heather Dreinen from Dartmouth and John Pepper at Beloco and a bunch of other businesses that really worked on creating that and getting those around town. They look really nice. If you have any feedback about those, let me know. But it really seemed to sort of spruce up, and it's nice when it's so dark out for so long to have a little bit of extra light in the downtown. So that's just another example of kind of a nice, low hanging, fruit type project that we are working really well on. That group is still meeting monthly, and we are shifting some of our focus to not only plan for the upcoming year and what sort of new events we're going to be doing in Hanover, working with parks and Rec, and we've got a couple other things that we're not quite ready to announce yet, but basically making sure that all the things that we're doing the downtown are coordinated with what's happening elsewhere in the upper valley. So we're not having events on the same night that another town might be having a big event. We're also going to be talking in those meetings about how to sustain all this engagement going forward. Something I've shared here before is a really high priority. We've been sort of operating like a startup so far, but we want to formalize that a little bit. So you're likely to hear a little bit more about potential solutions there in the coming months. So that's a lot of stuff.
[00:32:48] And that's two months, and apologize again for the delay there. So if you want to look up anything in more detail that I shared today, you can do. So I tried to put a lot of links in the podcast, and I will definitely be giving you all an update in February or at the end of February after our budget presentations with a whole bunch of information that is going to be geared really a lot of our effort over the next four to six weeks, I should say, is going to be about the budget. So hope to get you get some good information about that.
[00:33:15] And again, appreciate everybody for engaging with what's happening in your community.
