The Bedford Finance Committee will carry its confrontation with variables battering the fiscal 2025 budget to the final month before Annual Town Meeting.
The committee secured several hundred thousand dollars of cuts from municipal and school leaders last week, but most of those will impact the free-cash balance. The committee will reconvene next Tuesday, just a few days before the Town Meeting warrant’s printing deadline.
“We haven’t voted anything yet, and have another full meeting or two,” committee Chair Ben Thomas said in an email on Monday.
During a lengthy meeting last Thursday, Town Manager Matt Hanson said he reduced the road maintenance amount by $200,000, and cut the same amount from a $2.2 million expenditure for a connection to the metropolitan water system at the Burlington line.
Superintendent of Schools Cliff Chuang also committed to reductions totaling $400,000. Seeding for a proposed new stabilization fund for unbudgeted out-of-district special-education tuition would be reduced from $500,000 to $300,000. Chuang added that $200,000 in proposed safety and security equipment in the capital budget can be deferred for a year.
But the town’s $16 million free cash account was targeted for most of these expenses. Finance Committee members have pointed out that since the town relies on free cash every year to balance the budget, the formula amounts to a structural deficit.
Sources for free cash can range from spikes in building permit fees to unanticipated personal property assessments.
“We do remain cautious about free cash usage,” Thomas said Monday. “We try to maintain a balance between not letting it build up too much, and running out.”
The committee targets free cash to specific line items for the coming year, avoiding future commitments that would have to be funded through taxes.
“The structural deficit is when we have recurring expenses outpacing recurring revenues,” said member Karen Dunn. “You can’t take one-time gains and put them toward something that’s going to cost you more every single year.”
“We’re a service organization and we want to continue to maintain our services,” said Hanson in answer to a question from Dunn. He said the hardest part of his job is to balance “providing salaries that staff deserves” and “providing the level of services people expect and keeping taxpayers happy. It’s almost an impossible act.”
Hanson noted that the town will no longer be making electronic vehicle chargers available to residents for free, saving about $40,000 a year. But he wants to redirect any savings to bolster some non-union salaries that are too low, according to a classification and compensation study.
Chuang told the committee that the proposed fiscal 2025 budget reflects “what is happening across the commonwealth,” because of a “delayed effect” from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. “This is an unusual request for Bedford historically, but not an unusual request relative to other communities now.”
Committee member Abbie Seibert acknowledged that the current “big contract year” coincides with “challenges coming out of very unstable, unpredictable times,” beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago. “That’s how I look at your budget: charting a new normal.”
Chuang concurred: “We are coming out of a period of instability and we need to recalibrate. Part of what we are trying to accomplish is to make investments that relieve some of the pressure” and “hopefully stabilize the budget.”
The proposed “maintenance of effort” budget, more than 80 percent of which consists of salaries, is intact. And Chuang said his discretionary additions – a new literacy curriculum, a revamped substitute teacher assignment system, student trauma services – “I believe are absolutely essential.”
School Committee member Sheila Mehta-Green added, “All these are the tools the teachers need in the classroom.”
The School Committee hoped to lessen the impact of the cost of the new literacy curriculum by requesting a reserve-fund transfer for the estimated $210,000 one-time startup costs. But the Finance Committee is likely to add the amount back into the fiscal 2025 budget since reserve-fund requests are required to be limited to unexpected expenses.
“It isn’t that we don’t care about the schools,” said Finance Committee member Philip Prince. “We are trying to solve a math puzzle. What would a tax increase do to some residents?” He added, “Everybody takes a little bit of the pain so nobody has to take a lot of pain.”
Thomas asked about fees for student parking, but Chuang and Finance Director Julie Kirrane replied that collection costs would offset much of the gain. Thomas acknowledged that fees for athletics and other extracurricular activities would be “a third rail.”
Committee member Mark Bailey asked Chuang if he could assure Town Meeting that the budget increase is an aberration. The superintendent wouldn’t go that far; he said that “we are in good faith trying to make that correction.”
Thomas suggested a couple of longer-term cost-saving measures: consolidating the schools’ and town’s finance and human resources departments. Currently, expenditures for utilities and employee medical insurance are combined in the budget.
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