11/22/2004 Committee meetings report
Last Monday, while I was spending the evening celebrating my sweetheart's birthday with her, there were back-to-back meetings of the Legislative and Finance Committees. I heard reports of those meetings yesterday.

Legislative

The two main topics discussed at the Legislative Committee meeting were the fire department's anti-false-alarm legislation, and CM Kiernan's campaign finance legislation.

I wish I could have been there for the false alarms discussion, because I was concerned about that legislation from before. I didn't hear much detail about it in my reports, and hope to find out more at tonight's council meeting.

It sounded like most of the council was on board for the Campaign Finance legislation, with the exception of CM Ray "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" Badders. I hope treats his car better than that -- if you don't change the oil and tune it up occasionally, when it "breaks" it will be very expensive to fix!! The committee did want the legislation to be focused a bit, to emphasize reporting donations rather than preventing "bad" donations, and to minimize paperwork while still meeting the goal of keeping finances clean. CM Kiernan hoped to have a simplified and focused version available for the council tonight.

Finance

The Finance Committee seemed to feel that the town's finances were in reasonable shape, and that with some modest belt-tightening (which the department heads had already done, at least on paper) the town would finish the fiscal year with a $15,000 (or so) surplus. That's pretty tight, but a lot better than the dire predictions we were hearing a few months ago.

Town resident Judy Gienger spoke to the finance committee at length about what she perceived as an incorrect method of reporting the town's surplus on the auditor's report. She has had a lot of experience with government finances, so it seems worthwhile to at least check out her suggestion. Mayor Tiberio used his standard line of "This is the way we've done it for years and years, we don't need to change it." While that may be true, I hope he's going to work to check it out before the town gets in trouble.

It's time now for me to get ready for the meeting.
- posted by Alan K. Thompson @ 7:37 PM