39 min
Spotlight: Town Budget 101 and Hanover's FY25 Budget Top Highlights Hanover Happenings
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- Government
In this episode I sit down with Ellen Bullion, Finance Director, to talk some budget!
We start off with a basic Budget 101 - revenue/appropriations, operating/capital, how the budget leads to the tax rate, and some differences between private and public sector budgeting.
We then move on to cover a very broad overview of the FY25 budget, and the "Top 12" highlights of things to keep an eye on in the FY25 budget that was approved by the Selectboard on April 1st, and endorsed by the Finance Committee.
What we cover in this episode will be largely mirrored in the Town Report as well.
Then we discuss the many backup documents that contain more information if you want more on any specific topic. We summarize some of the key ones below. The available backup documents can all be accessed at hanovernh.org/budget:
A full Excel Workbook of the budget. This is broken down by department, includes a summary tab, and tax rate calculation tab. You can see down to the account level across the organization.
All slides and videos from the budget presentations. These include department presentations and plans, budget highlights, social service applications, and more. It’s a lot of information – three meetings of more than three hours each.
All items not included in the budget. Over $600,000 of evaluated budget requests were not included in the budget due to affordability constraints. This memo outlines what items weren’t included, why, and what may be evaluated in future years.
Updated Undesignated Fund Balance tracking. These include a revised tracking sheet that looks at the ‘surplus’ funds in each of the Town’s funds.
A new draft template for tracking personnel levels. This draft of a new tracking template includes information such as FTEs, headcount, PTO utilization, and more, meant to give a sense of the staffing levels and pressure on the organization and trends over time.
Retention and Recruitment memo. This is a somewhat more detailed memo on the Retention and Recruitment issues and personnel costs.
The full report of the newly formed Capital Improvement Program Committee. This is the first year that Hanover has been in compliance for capital planning, and the multi-stakeholder group that reviewed the capital requests has an even bigger job in coming years to incorporate all of the cost items that haven’t been included before. This is the Town’s most transparent capital plan so far, and you can read the full report (it’s long) or the summary.
Memo summarizing the FY22 audit and related issues. The FY22 was recently completed, and identified a number of serious, but resolvable, issues in how the Town has been conducting accounting practices. Through collaboration with the Finance Committee and Selectboard, this resulted in a new accounting position added to the Town organizational chart to both help fix these issues and prevent issues from arising in the future.
A summary of the union contracts. These are the first multi-year contracts in some time, agreed to through a more collaborative approach, and in line with the updates policies and programs offered to all Town staff.
Links to the Town’s Master Plan. These documents are important planning documents, and one of the goals in the FY25 budget was to not only connect budget items to the Selectboard’s goals, but the Master Plan as well.
In this episode I sit down with Ellen Bullion, Finance Director, to talk some budget!
We start off with a basic Budget 101 - revenue/appropriations, operating/capital, how the budget leads to the tax rate, and some differences between private and public sector budgeting.
We then move on to cover a very broad overview of the FY25 budget, and the "Top 12" highlights of things to keep an eye on in the FY25 budget that was approved by the Selectboard on April 1st, and endorsed by the Finance Committee.
What we cover in this episode will be largely mirrored in the Town Report as well.
Then we discuss the many backup documents that contain more information if you want more on any specific topic. We summarize some of the key ones below. The available backup documents can all be accessed at hanovernh.org/budget:
A full Excel Workbook of the budget. This is broken down by department, includes a summary tab, and tax rate calculation tab. You can see down to the account level across the organization.
All slides and videos from the budget presentations. These include department presentations and plans, budget highlights, social service applications, and more. It’s a lot of information – three meetings of more than three hours each.
All items not included in the budget. Over $600,000 of evaluated budget requests were not included in the budget due to affordability constraints. This memo outlines what items weren’t included, why, and what may be evaluated in future years.
Updated Undesignated Fund Balance tracking. These include a revised tracking sheet that looks at the ‘surplus’ funds in each of the Town’s funds.
A new draft template for tracking personnel levels. This draft of a new tracking template includes information such as FTEs, headcount, PTO utilization, and more, meant to give a sense of the staffing levels and pressure on the organization and trends over time.
Retention and Recruitment memo. This is a somewhat more detailed memo on the Retention and Recruitment issues and personnel costs.
The full report of the newly formed Capital Improvement Program Committee. This is the first year that Hanover has been in compliance for capital planning, and the multi-stakeholder group that reviewed the capital requests has an even bigger job in coming years to incorporate all of the cost items that haven’t been included before. This is the Town’s most transparent capital plan so far, and you can read the full report (it’s long) or the summary.
Memo summarizing the FY22 audit and related issues. The FY22 was recently completed, and identified a number of serious, but resolvable, issues in how the Town has been conducting accounting practices. Through collaboration with the Finance Committee and Selectboard, this resulted in a new accounting position added to the Town organizational chart to both help fix these issues and prevent issues from arising in the future.
A summary of the union contracts. These are the first multi-year contracts in some time, agreed to through a more collaborative approach, and in line with the updates policies and programs offered to all Town staff.
Links to the Town’s Master Plan. These documents are important planning documents, and one of the goals in the FY25 budget was to not only connect budget items to the Selectboard’s goals, but the Master Plan as well.
39 min