Current Issues and Thoughts
September 24, 2006

The next selectmen’s meeting is Monday, September 25, 2006, at 5:35pm. The agenda for the meeting is available by clicking the link to the left.

The chairman has moved the start of the formal meeting to 5:35pm (instead of 5:30pm) so that the opening prayer, which will occur at 5:30pm, will not be part of the formal meeting. This is interesting logic -- does it address the concerns that were raised? We'll continue to have the "invocation" just as it was before, in Town Hall, but the timing will be 5 minutes before the beginning of the formal meeting. Please post your own 2 cents on the blog (click link at left).

At 6:00pm we'll discuss the "history" of the town's tax rates and government spending, to try to learn some lessons for the future. The selectmen’s new “tax cap” of 3.5% for 2007 shows some real discipline and is a far cry from the 31% town tax increase over the last several years.

Continuing our foray into finance, later in the evening we'll discuss the ticking time bomb of the state pension fund and the potential "double" of Milford's town contributions to roughly $1 million per year to help bail out the underfunded pension plan.

Guy Scaife's regular "town administrator report" will include, among other things, an update on ambulance privatization and ambulance/fire merger.

We'll discuss the town's approach to enforcing the rules for political signs (this should be an interesting one!). We'll also take up, for reconsideration, the traffic safety issues at McGettigan Road and Isaac Frye Highway.

The town-wide ethics policy is once again on the agenda, with a presentation scheduled by Gary Daniels and Noreen O'Connell. Hopefully we can bring this to a conclusion (in other words, adopt the darn thing while we're still breathing).

We'll discuss the legislative policy recommendations of the New Hampshire Municipal Association (NHMA), and seek to come to a consensus on the selectmen's support or opposition to each proposal.
The last agenda item is a discussion of my proposal for a new town employee compensation system. I am suggesting more reliance on performance reviews and performance pay.

To encourage discussion, I am putting up posts on several of these agenda items on the blog (click link at left).

Thanks in advance for your participation, and for your comments, thoughts and suggestions.