City Council Ad Hoc Budget Committee of the Whole Meeting

The Ad Hoc Budget Committee of the Whole held a FY27 budget hearing where department heads and the Mayor’s office presented proposed budgets and answered Council questions. Presentations included the Mayoral Department and Legal Services, followed by Administration & Finance (covering liability insurance, municipal buildings, central supply, state and county assessments, reserve fund, employee benefits, other assessments, and debt service). Councilors probed items such as a COLA salary increase, a 2% reduction in the Mayor’s office budget (attributed to cuts to office supplies, elimination of sick/vacation buybacks, and removal of a yearbook advertisement), unpredictability of legal fees (citing an unexpected 40B matter), an identified error on the employee benefits slide to be corrected, the lack of a current cost-recovery plan for Weights and Measures, the rationale for retaining 62 Friend St for long-term planning, and an estimated $700,000–$800,000 cost to procure new accounting software through a competitive bid process.

Subsequent departmental presentations included Human Resources (request to add one full-time staff position and plans to reduce travel costs by favoring virtual continuing education), the Assessor (noting a short-term shared arrangement with Salisbury and a suggestion to post office hours online), and the Library (noting reductions in staff hours via both position elimination and hour reductions, and emphasizing the essential nature of the Head Archivist role to maintain public access to archival records). No final budget adoption vote or other substantive Council votes were recorded in the minutes, and there were no public comments recorded in the official minutes.