Communications from her Honor, The Mayor and Other City Officials

Transcript (~5 min @ 32:52)

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▶ 32:49 Leila Migliorelli: All right. Back to the agenda. We are now at communications from her honor, the mayor. And, um, before we hear from the mayor, I'll motion by unanimous consent to suspend rule 37 B. Seeing no objection, rule 37 B is now suspended. Um, welcome Madam Mayor.

▶ 33:09 Jen Grigoraitis: Thank you Madam President. Good evening everyone. Um, I provided you all with a hard copy of a memo from Carrie Golden, our CFO City auditor, which is a fiscal update on the first quarter of FY 2025 for your perusal. Um, as I think you're all probably aware, we spend much of the fiscal quarter, first quarter, um, straddling three fiscal years closing out FY 24 being in FY 25 and beginning to prepare for FY 26. So this has an update on revenues, um, as well as where we are in all of our current budget categories and some updates on our various enterprise funds. Um, uh, carrie's obviously happy to answer questions that anyone may have. I think the kind of takeaways are that we are, you know, largely okay moving through this current fiscal year. We are watching, um, the overtime budget for fire because we are seeing, still seeing significant costs there due to some absences and still looking to fill some vacancies. And are revenues are also largely okay, but somewhat down from, um, where we had projected them to be. And as you all may recall, when we, um, balanced the budget for this for FY 25, we did that using a larger portion of local receipts. So it's really important that those numbers come in as anticipated. Um, the other thing that's I don't believe in here, but I just wanted to mention to you all is that we are looking at the very preliminary estimates for FY 26 of the model. And right now our estimate, and it is an estimate, is that to raise all costs by two point a half percent across all city and school cost centers would leave us about $1.9 million short of where we're currently projecting to be. So obviously a lot of moving pieces still we'll need, you know, it'll be some months before we understand state aid, before we know what mandatory health insurance and pension obligation costs will be. But some of those numbers are already starting to come in. I believe one item in here that Ms. Golden included is that our, um, obligation for the new Vogue School last year it was around 250,000. And for FY 25 it's estimated to be about 500,000. So that's obviously an increase that we'll need to go into our bottom line. So this is really just informational to give you all a snapshot of where we are and Carrie will continue to provide these. Um, and then the other two quick updates I wanted to share is that, um, we are still waiting for the division of local services to start our comprehensive review. They've had some delays on their end and right now that is estimated to initially kick off in mid-November. And then I know I had talked with you all on when we were talking about the skylights, about the fact that we are down to police cruisers, which was an unanticipated loss due to some accidents. Um, we are planning to replace one cruiser between, um, the money that we're gonna get from insurance and then some allocated, but Unended ARPA funds, we're looking at an additional cost of only $7,000, which we'll be able to meet with ARPA funds. So that will be a standard cruiser given the current backlog in the EV market. And there's actually currently a statewide exemption for police cruisers, um, to be ev vehicles through 2026. So we're hoping to have that online as soon as possible. So those are my updates.

▶ 36:22 Speaker 8: Thank you Madam Mayor. Thank you. Councilor Gepe,

▶ 36:26 Mark Garipay: Can, I'm sorry, can I No, you can. I, I appreciate this. I do have some questions, but I'll go through it and we'll, we'll, I'll send an email, but one, one quick item on here on the, I know they have oversight for it. We do approve their bottom line, but is there any way in the next three months that we could just get, see how the schools are doing financially, if maybe you could just mention it to the chair of the school committee or just a summary of how, how they're doing. So we are kept in tune. Um, so we don't run into any situations like

▶ 37:00 Jen Grigoraitis: we have in the, in the past. Sure. Absolutely. I mean, they also, in the school committee meetings, there's actually, um, a budget. They do even more frequent budget updates than we do. But I can also ask for something a little more comprehensive from the school, um, finance manager. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.

▶ 37:18 Cal Finocchiaro: I was just gonna say thank you. You're welcome for putting this together because

▶ 37:22 Speaker 2: it's a nice little snapshot.