Tonight (2017-11-13) was a meeting of the Mendon Town Board.
The most important item on the agenda was likely the approval of next years budget. While it will almost certainly be adjusted and tweaked as the year goes by, the town has a budget for going into next year.
I asked, and the total budget is about $5.1 million dollars. With a tax levy approximately $30 thousand less then last year. Not being a financial expert, I couldn’t get those numbers out of the preliminary budget. While it’s great the Town makes the numbers available, they aren’t the easiest to make sense of.
A pair of the board members applauded Bruce, the chair of the Zoning Board, for his good work. As I sit on the ZBA, it was nice to see him being applauded.
Certain employees will be contributing less to their health insurance, with a greater portion being covered by the Town. There was also discussion about decreasing this amount even more, so that all of the Town’s employees pay the same percentage of their insurance costs. Amusing as I can recall when a previous board was trying to push as much of the insurance cost onto the employees, for budgetary reasons. Back and forth, for a time the board pushes one way. Then the situation changes and the board of that time pushes the other.
The Town is looking for bids for a project at the Mendon Public Library. Interesting because it is one project, but they are putting out two different bid packages. Sounds like there are two grants, being combined to do a larger project. Part of renovating a storage area into a children’s area.
A special meeting is scheduled for December 28th, at 9AM. Sounds like it will be to try and get as many of this years bills paid this year, as opposed to next year. Village and School do the same thing, usually makes for very short meetings.
As there was concern that some of the people in the room couldn’t hear over the sound of the ventilation system, a speaker system was used. Nice idea, but they set the volume too high for my tastes. If there was a larger attendance it would have made more sense. With the numbers in the audience, we wouldn’t have even filled the first row. Which leaves me of the opinion speakers should stay off and people should move as they see fit.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the November 13, 2017 meeting of the Mendon Town Board.
Link to agenda on Town website until they update it, losing the past.
Link to agenda stored on this site, for when the town lose their copy.