The Select Board - specifically Jeanette Stewart and Dan Golden - have effectively stone walled the Budget Committee by denying their request for an Excel spreadsheet of the town's budget. This decision means that the Budget Committee will have to do hours of needless, tedious work re-entering all of the data into their own Excel spreadsheet so that they can prepare the budget and present it to townspeople on January 12. Dan Golden said that the Budget Committee has asked for too much information and that there are formulas in the spreadsheet the Budget Committee should not see. I'm not sure what is so confidential about formulas, but the spreadsheet data can be copied and pasted without the formulas, an operations that takes about 20 seconds. (Here are the commands: Select All, Copy, Paste Special, Paste Values.) Of course, an extra minute or is involved in emailing the file to the Budget Committee.
First, I want to explain more about the issue with the spreadsheet, and then I want to address the claim that the Budget Committee has gone too far.
The town provides the Budget Committee with a PDF file of the budget. A PDF file is essentially a picture of the Excel spreadsheet. The committee can only view the budget figures in this format; it cannot enter its own figures. The committee, however, needs to be able to enter its own figures because it reviews and votes on each line item, and it also creates the default budget. The committee does not need to change the town's figures or see the formulas used to create the figures; it simply needs to add its own figures and total them. If the town had provided a spreadsheet with just the values, the Budget Committee could have used that spreadsheet during their deliberations to enter the figures for their proposed budget and the default budget. As it is, they had to write down all the figures by hand, and they will have to re-enter them along with all of the data in the original spreadsheet. Although it can be done, there is no easy way to convert a PDF file to and Excel file. There is simply no good reason why the town cannot provide the Budget Committee with the budget in Excel format.
Second, I want to respond to the claim made by Dan Golden that the Budget Committee has asked for too much information. Selectman Golden did not explain what he meant by this or provide examples so that we could understand his reasoning. The Budget Committee can question any line item in the budget and ask for rationale. The Budget Committee cannot, however, question management decisions. A good example of this, and perhaps one of the most controversial, concerns the Electric Department's accounting practices. (I have written about this on the blog.) The Electric Department uses an accrual accounting system. They enter the billed amounts as income at the time the bills are sent out, and they enter the expenses once they actually pay their bills. This means that on the monthly financial reports, income is overstated and expenses are understated. It may take several months before the actual income and expenses are reported depending on when they receive payments and when they receive and pay their bills. Companies usually estimate their expenses so that their monthly reports are close to the actual income and expenses; the Electric Department does not. The Budget Committee cannot tell the Electric Department how to do their accounting, but the committee needs to understand how they account for income and expenses so they can read the financial reports. At the time the committee was reviewing these matters, Dan Golden felt that the committee was going too far. However, the committee did not cross the line between asking how the accounting is done and telling the department how to do its accounting. Although these discussions were difficult to understand, the committee and the public has a much better understanding of how the Electric Department operates.
Many people have commented that this year's Budget Committee has asked more questions than they have in the past. I might add, that they have asked more difficult questions. Some departments have made more thorough presentations than others: the Fire Department and the School Board are excellent examples. The committee had more questions for departments that did not make very thorough presentations. In determining the final budget, the committee and the townspeople need to know as much detail as possible. We are in a very difficult financial position. We have been in a recession for four years, our taxes are high in relation to other towns, the budget of some of our departments are high in relation to other other towns, our debt as a percentage of the budget is extremely high in relation to other towns, and we have not put away a great deal of money to meet our large capital expenses. The Budget Committee has done much of the hard work for us. They have asked the hard questions that many of us would have asked or should have asked. We will have to decide what we can afford, but that decision will be easier because we have the facts we need.
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