A bleary-eyed Town Council adjourned around 12:30 AM after a Marathon session that saw the Council chambers packed with citizens half an hour before the scheduled start of the meeting. And they kept coming, filling the hallway and eventually prompting a hasty set up of a conference room on the floor above.
The citizen comment section of the meeting ran to about 40 minutes with multiple people proposing override dates, tax discounts for seniors, and pleas for funding restorations from a number of students.
A lengthy hearing in which the owner of Pour Richards sought to transfer her all-alcohol license to BJs with BJs transferring its beer and wine license to a new corporation that is taking over the Pour Richards brand. Representatives of Franklin Liquors and Liquor world both expressed opposition to ‘big box’ stores. When it all came to a vote a strong majority of the council voted no – to the surprise of many in the audience and the clear dismay of the organizations that had planned the license transfer.
The real meat of the meeting, was the budget revision topic, which eventually came forward before 9 pm. It included a long list of potential tier1, 2, and 3 cuts intended to free up money to get the school budget back to ‘level service’ for the year ahead.
The administration actually proposed a potential vote based on the Tier 1 cuts – totaling over a million dollars in cuts. But the discussion of this measure ended up spawning a new one. Councilor Chandler asked some questions about the measure and then, as an aside, vociferously condemned the large raises given out by the former Superintendent Sarah Ahern... He also raised the idea, long avoided by the Council and School Committee, of dipping into so-called rainy-day funds.
Softened by both the depth of programming cuts implemented at the schools and the potential need to cut staff at the fire, police, and DPW departments, other councilors expressed interest and concern about the measure.
Ultimately, Town Administrator Jamie Hellen proposed a mixture of modest cuts and the use of school department and town rainy day funds. Based on encouragement from the Council, Jamie asked that his staff be given time to crunch number and come up with a proposal that could be voted on.
This was done within a few minutes and, after some more chat, the measure was voted unanimously.
However, Hellen said the breathing room this vote provides should be used to support community conversations that can lead to another override vote, perhaps in early 2025.
