Monday, March 10, 2014

Franklin, MA: Finance Committee - first Budget Hearing - Agenda

Franklin gets the budget hearing season underway Tuesday evening with the Finance Committee meeting at 7:00 PM in the 3rd Fl Training Room.

The listing of the mostly small and central administration budgets to be reviewed on Tuesday can be found here. The actual budget document has not yet been posted to the Franklin webpage. Once it is available, I will share it.

What is the budget process?
Jeff Nutting, Town Administrator (TA) and Susan Gagner, Town Comptroller, gather all the requirements from each of the departments and make a recommendation. The working budget document usually displays the last several years of budget for each department, this years request, and then the TA recommendation.

The Finance Committee does its review of the budget meeting with each of the department managers to get into a detail discussion of their operation as it relates to the budget. What is driving the increase (if any)?

After the Finance Committee hears all the budget details, it makes its recommendation to the Town Council. The Town Council used to go through a similar process of meeting with the department heads but the last couple of years has gotten away from that. They simply read the budget line items, a member has an opportunity to put a 'hold' on any item which they then come back to for a discussion.

So if you do want to find out what is really in the budget, you need to follow the Finance Committee meetings. This is where the details are revealed.

Franklin Municipal Building
Franklin Municipal Building


Dept - Budget - Page

Employee Benefits 910 G-10

Human Resources 152 A-21

Town Council 111 A-1

Town Administrator 123 A-2

Finance Committee 131 A-4

Comptroller 135 A-5

Assessors 141 A-10

Treasurer/Collector 147 A-14

Legal 151 A-19

Appeals Board 176 A-37

Central Services 196 A-50

Animal Control 292 B-56

Parking Meter 293 B-58

Memorial Day 692 F-12

Cultural Council 695 F-13

Debt 710/750 G-1

General Insurance 945 G-22



No comments:

Post a Comment