HomeMy WebLinkAbout2007-02-08-AC-min
February 8, 2007
Minutes
Town of Lexington Appropriation Committee
February 8, 2007
Place and time: Town Hall, room 111, 7:38 p.m.
Members present: Alan Levine (Chair), Deborah Brown (Vice Chair), John Bartenstein
(Secretary), Mike Kennealy, David Kanter, Richard Eurich, Rod Cole, Pam Hoffman,
Eric Michelson, Rob Addelson (ex officio, non-voting).
Also present: Mary Ellen Dunn, Tom Griffiths, Tom Diaz, George Burnell
The meeting was called to order at 7:40 p.m. with a quorum present.
1. The first order of business was a discussion with Mary Ellen Dunn,
Assistant Superintendent for Business and Finance, to discuss School
financial issues. We received background information on changes
anticipated in the developing school budget. Mary Ellen is looking to
update the budget book based on many of the questions she has received
from the various boards and citizens. This will hopefully improve the
usefulness of the information in the budget book. One area of difficulty for
her due to her short tenure in her position is having confidence in staffing
and FTE numbers.
Mary Ellen welcomes a financial review committee. She hopes to build
better procedures and policies, and this would help that effort. One thing
in particular she hopes to do is better train others, such as secretaries and
department heads, in using the Munis software system to enable better
financial tracking and reporting. She is currently working on better
segregation of people vs. accounts.
The time to get all the accounting matters in hand could be as short as
several months to as long as a couple of years. This requires a transition
from a system of going back and forth between using Excel and Munis, to
the exclusive use of Munis. Mary Ellen has lots of experience in using
Munis and understands what needs to be done, but needs to bring the other
users along too.
Mary Ellen gave a list of some examples of problems that arose last year.
For example, vendors sending invoices without purchase orders, wrong
bills being sent, and mishandled encumbrances.
SPED cost estimation was also discussed. The financial secretary does the
projections. The difficulty of estimating costs for unknown students was
discussed. How the circuit breaker money is budgeted was covered.
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February 8, 2007
2. The proposed new DPW facility was discussed next. David Kanter
discussed the fact that the project was tightly fit to the operational and
programmatic needs of the DPW. Esthetics and design issues were also
discussed.
The AC voted unanimously to endorse the current direction of the work to
revisit the DPW project; to be sure the programmatic needs are well
supported and that the design is adjusted to best fit the needs in a cost
effective manner; and to support the continued effort to proceed with the
design document work.
The meeting was adjourned at 10:00 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Rod Cole
Approved December 5, 2007
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