2007-11-14 Ad hoc Budget Schedule Report

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SUMMARY FINDINGS The committee studied and discussed several alternatives: 1. Hold town elections in November, allowing Town Meeting to convene much earlier. This attracted interest but is contravened by state law, which requires our annual town elections to be held in February -May. (i1{GL Ch. 39, 9A) A change of election date would also require a change of town bylaws. 2. Schedule override elections on the first Monday in Match, on the same day as town elections —that is, before Town Meeting convenes. 3 . Collapse the schedules for both the budget and Town Meeting as much as possible, to make an override election as early as possible. The result is called an "optimal schedule" in this report. The committee recommends the third course of action --- option 3 —and it will be discussed in more detail later in this report. Option 2 was researched and discussed. There are towns that conduct overrides before their annual town meetings actually vote on the budget. However, there are few doing so that also have representative town meetings. In Lexington's political culture, the committee believes this option would require the budget to be completed extremely early (including approval by the elected boards), because voters and campaigners would expect the usual level of budget detail in the Yes and No override campaigns. A budget might have to be completed in December if it were to be the subject of a March 1 override, and yct,, for reasons explained later, budgets are not likely to be fully approved before February. There was also a consensus in the committee that members of our representative town meeting would feel disenfranchised by an override campaign and election that prejudged the budget to be presented to the annual Town Meeting. Option 3 would allow overrides to be scheduled as early as the second half of April, if the department heads and their governing boards, seeing the necessity of an override, were to make an early override a very high priority. The Superintendent comments' that a mid -April override would be enormously advantageous compared with our current situation, in which a great deal of hiring is delayed until the summer. 4 Private communication between Superintendent P. Ash and "1". Diaz, Q4 2007. 4