Good morning Sangerville,

Hopefully everyone had an enjoyable holiday season. At the town office these days, the majority of our work is preparing the budget, with the guidance of the budget committee and approval of the select board for the town meeting warrant in March. That would be the next discussion point in my ongoing discussion of how we create a budget. We start in the town office by reviewing our expenses and revenues for the previous year. We look at what additional expenses and projects we anticipate for the coming year, add expected or ideally in some cases known inflation variables and we look to see if we can save on any expense items. We put those figures into a line-item format and discuss them with the budget advisory committee, whose first 2025 meeting is tonight at 6:00 PM at the fire station. This, as all public meetings is open to the public. The budget advisory committee makes their recommendations as we go through the full municipal budget, which happens over two to three meetings, then there is a final meeting with the budget advisory committee and select board to set the budget that will be presented in a series of warrant articles to the citizens at the annual town meeting.

Our select board meeting schedule proved a bit challenging through the holiday season as the holidays fell on Wednesdays last year. We had a special select board meeting with a very limited agenda on Monday December 30, 2024, for the select board to sign the warrant so we could pay the end of the year bills and close the books. We had initially planned to meet on January 8th and January 15th. Because of a very light agenda for the 8th and one of our board members needing the 8th off we decided to move all our January 8th agenda items to the January 15th meeting. So, we will not be meeting tomorrow evening but returning to the regular meeting schedule of the first and third Wednesdays beginning with next Wednesday the 15th’s meeting.

I would like to close by reminding everyone that all our meetings are public, and the public is welcome and encouraged to attend and participate.