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Home My WebLink About2026-03-12-AC-min.pdf 3/12/2026 AC Minutes 1 Minutes Town of Lexington Appropriation Committee (AC) March 12, 2026 Place and Time: Remote participation via a Zoom teleconferencing session that was open to the public; 7:30 p.m. Members Present: Glenn Parker, Chair; Sanjay Padaki, Vice-Chair; Alan Levine, Secretary; Anil Ahuja; John Bartenstein; Eric Michelson; Sean Osborne; Vinita Verma; Lily Yan Members Absent: Carolyn Kosnoff, Assistant Town Manager, Finance (non-voting, ex officio) Other Attendees: Lisah Rhodes, Capital Expenditures Committee (CEC) All votes recorded below were conducted by roll call. At 7:37 p.m. Mr. Parker called the meeting to order and took attendance by roll call. Announcements and Liaison Reports No reports were made. Discussion of Financial Articles for the 2026 Annual Town Meeting Mr. Michelson stated that he is concerned regarding discrepancies in the operating budget related to Article 31 (refuse disposal bylaw revisions). The FY2027 budget shown in a table in the presenta- tion for Article 31 includes zero dollars specifically for bulky item disposal while the corresponding amounts were $180,000 in FY2026 and $175,000 in FY2025. Mr. Michelson said that Ms. Kosnoff told him that this cost is captured in trash disposal, but the trash disposal increase in the table in the Article 31 presentation may not be sufficient to cover this amount. Furthermore, the motion for Ar- ticle 9 would allow no spending from the Refuse & Recycling Revolving Fund to offset bulky item expenses if Article 31 passes. Mr. Michelson will discuss this topic again with Ms. Kosnoff. Mr. Padaki asked whether the changes to the bylaw in the motion for Article 31 would allow the Se- lect Board to charge fees that would cover all trash and recycling costs. The discussion indicated that would be the case. Mr. Levine said that the bylaw can either allow or not allow fees but that there is no in-between case. If one wants any fees to be allowed, then one must trust the Select Board and the political process to set fees that the community can accept. Mr. Levine also noted that the way trash and recycling are managed is not consistent with the way they were managed when the bylaw was originally written and that it is no longer reasonable to prohibit fees for all aspects of trash and recycling services. Mr. Bartenstein gave a brief overview of Article 5 (enterprise fund operating budgets). He started by saying that it includes nothing remarkable or unusual. The amount of the increase over the cur- rent year for the Water Enterprise Fund is 4.4% and that for the Wastewater Enterprise Fund is 1.3%. The combined increase is about 3%. The MWRA assessment increases of 2.83% in the case of water and 1% in the case of wastewater are included in the overall increases just noted. Mr. Bar- tenstein also noted that the source of funding for water and wastewater capital projects is in the sev- enth year of a transition over about ten years from borrowing to user rates and retained earnings which, during the transition, leads to an increase in the budget requests. He said he was unsure why the budgeted amounts for debt service are not decreasing. He and others speculated that the reason 3/12/2026 AC Minutes 2 is that the increases are due to recent debt issuances for capital projects authorized several years ago. Mr. Bartenstein added that there isn’t much of note in the budget request for the Recreation Department except for an increase in personnel costs due to collective bargaining agreements. No vote was taken on Article 6 (amend FY2026 budgets) as the details are not yet fully available. Regarding Article 7 (sustainable projects), Mr. Osborne said that the backup material includes a fleet electrification roadmap document. That document showed a schedule for the replacement of the current police cruisers with electric vehicles in the years 2031 to 2035. He also said that he be- lieves there may be only six police cruisers, which calls into question the need for 8 charging ports. Mr. Padaki reinforced that point by noting that the Station doesn’t need one charging port per elec- tric vehicle. Furthermore, the amount requested under Article 7 is higher than what one would ex- pect from the typical costs for charging ports given in the roadmap. Mr. Levine said that if one takes the amount requested for Article 7, $463,000, divides it by 25 corresponding to a 25-year life for the chargers, and by 6 or 8 for 6 or 8 electric vehicles, one gets about $2500 per vehicle per year which doesn’t sound unreasonable and may even be less than the savings from using electricity rather than gasoline. No vote was taken to allow time for Mr. Osborne to further investigate the article. The Committee discussed the details of Article 19 (specified stabilization funds) and the write-up in the draft report. No objections to the article were raised. Mr. Bartenstein gave background information on Article 24 (elderly and disabled taxation aid fund and committee) and briefly summarized what the article would do. He said that certain parts of the presentation on the Town Meeting web page are not accurate. For instance, he does not believe that the enabling statute would allow Town Meeting to appropriate any monies into the fund that would be set up by the article. He also noted that the enabling statute would give the proposed committee unlimited discretion in giving assistance to low-income elderly and or disabled people, i.e., the aid would not necessarily be limited to so-called “edge cases”. Mr. Bartenstein added that there is a provision in a state statute that applies broadly to hardship cases that allows exemptions of property taxes, but the exemptions come out of the overlay account so they would come at a cost to the town. Regarding Article 27 (citizen article, online capital project platform), Mr. Padaki stated that he had removed one paragraph to update the write up to be consistent with the revised motion. Mr. Parker said that he had been in touch with the article proponents about potential additional changes to the motion, but they would not revise it to split the task into two parts, i.e., a requirements analysis/im- plementation design for this town meeting followed by an implementation phase that would be funded via an article at a future town meeting. Ms. Rhodes heard that Mr. Kaufman had determined that the Munis financial software that the Town uses now comes as part of Tyler ERP software that contains a capital projects module. Lexington is not making use of the latter module. Regarding Article 26 (citizen article, oversee LHS financial expenditures), there was discussion of the dashboard demonstration done at the recent Select Board meeting. That conception only con- cerns the high school project and would involve manual cuts and pastes from a larger financial re- port. Regarding Article 8 (appropriate $75,000 for a Vision for Lexington survey), Mr. Levine said that this would be the fourth survey. There have been three previous surveys, each costing perhaps $50,000. He suggested the Committee ask what the Town got out of the previous surveys, for 3/12/2026 AC Minutes 3 example, what was changed because of a survey result. He asked if Ms. Verma could follow up on this with the article proponents, and she answered in the affirmative. A roll call vote of 9-0 confirmed all the votes shown in the table below. In regard to the proposed consent agenda list, the Committee agreed to the inclusion of Articles 16(a), 16(b), and 16(c) but not to the inclusion of 12(d), 12(o), or 16(d). Future Meeting Schedule The Committee will meet next week on Thursday, March 19, with the goal of completing the voting on all articles and making the final in-meeting changes to the report. Minutes of Prior Meetings The draft minutes for the meetings of February 26, 2026, and March 5, 2026, were approved by roll call vote (9-0). Planning for the Committee’s Report to the 2026 Annual Town Meeting Mr. Parker said that he would like to see the Committee approve the report at the March 19 meet- ing. Adjourn The meeting was adjourned by roll call vote at 9:36 p.m. Respectfully submitted, Alan M. Levine Approved: April 8, 2026 Exhibits ● Agenda, posted by Mr. Parker 3/12/2026 AC Minutes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