Live reporting - continued

Bartlett - we'll also need to show what the cuts were over the same time period to show what was done in order to make due.

Kelly - need to be consistent on the dates.

Bartlett - need to include the increases in road miles, students, teachers, buildings, etc.

Trahan - there should be substance to the information.

Ogden - growth and change in fees and other revenues that have come in to supplement the tax revenues

Kelly - the average tax bill needs to be looked at to put it into perspective.

Nutting - on the other hand, for all we have cut, people can still go to the library, get the streets plowed. Hard to say what the real impact is.

Bartlett - but we know now we can do this much longer, even to just stay the same. There isn't room to cut without significant changes.

Nutting - I'll come up with a list of things and you can add to it, or change it. I'll focus on the big picture.

Roche - I'd like to start digging into these numbers, like low medium and high for Fire/Police, etc.

Nutting - the salary is already set based upon the bargaining agreements.

Ogden - need to be caution about salary expectations and forecasts in that arena.

Hardesty - has a spreadsheet that shows the Town budgets in a declining order. Realistically this will help us focus as once you go lower than 6 budget lines, you are talking about 2% of the budget. Those as interesting as they are become not really material to the discussion.

Nutting - there is no game plan if Question 1 passes. If that passes, it will be chaos until the Legislature does something. It was on 8 years ago and got 45% of the vote.

Roche - Doug's building the model.
Nutting- I'll get the statistics.

Cameron - if our population has been flat for five years, we also need to remind them of that.

Nutting - you can give historical background, in 1993 there were 3200 students and now there are 6200 students.

Trahan - when do we get to the timeline?
Nutting - Budget to the Council probably in March.

Nutting - 80% of the HR rules are in the State, we don't get to control our destiny.

Roche - we are trying to show what the problem is, it is systemic.

Ogden - part of the problem is perceptual, the average citizen doesn't understand that we brought two buildings online and are going to need additional money to operate. The difference between capital and operational expenses.

Bartlett - I'll take a crack at the calendar.

Hardesty - the idea of level services needs to be defined to be consistent and easy to understand.

Bartlett - I have trouble with "level services" when used with education. You may say the same with the dollars but the education in the room is not the same "level".