Voters in Adams, Massachusetts gathered for their annual town meeting this week. Residents of the community of around 8,000 in Northern Berkshire County approved roughly $19 million in spending, including $7.2 million for town staff benefits and salaries and $2.5 million for municipal operations. The creation of a new revolving fund fueled by rental fees under the authority of the town administrator for the long-anticipated Greylock Glen outdoor center prompted conversation at the meeting. The more than $8 million, 10,000-square-foot facility at the foot of Mount Greylock – the tallest mountain in Massachusetts – is currently under construction and is expected to open later this year. WAMC spoke with Adams town administrator Jay Green to find out more about Monday’s votes.
GREEN: [It was a] very straightforward, very tactical [budget] designed to achieve very specific goals. Some of the more prouder moments are being able to have a couple of things on here for the Greylock Glen, showing continued progress on that, in putting in the mechanisms that that we need to make sure that the project is a success going forward and isn't an unreasonable burden on the taxpayer in Adams. It's a unique project, it's unique to Adams, it's not anything that a municipality normally the size of Adams would take on, but we recognize the regional significance of it, and we want to be sure that we got the mechanisms in place to see success go forward and begin to get an idea of really, what's it going to cost to operate the facility and make it attractive for private investment. So, that that was one big thing on there as well.
WAMC: Now, there was conversation at the meeting around the Greylock Glen spending, some concerns about controls over the spending, or a lack of specificity about what those numbers are going to look like. Can you speak to what that conversation was like and how you feel that the town is responding to that?
I certainly can. It's a function of understanding municipal finance, how municipal finance works, it's a function of understanding how the town of Adams is structured with a town administrator form of chief fiscal officer and chief operating officer. A revolving fund, many municipalities have them. They're authorized by the Department of Revenue, by [Massachusetts] General Law, to have. And a revolving fund, the most familiar comparison I can give is to that of a transfer station. It's a user-based fee. So, a transfer station, you buy bag tags, you buy a permit fee, it goes into a revolving fund, you have to pay the bills to empty the trash and remove the garbage and the rubbish from the transfer station. Those bills are paid for from the revolving fund. It's a user-based system. That's exactly what we want to do with Greylock Glen. Money eventually will come in from wedding rentals, gazebo rentals, other type of usage and rentals- Rentals of the outdoor center, renting rooms, there's a meeting space up there. Any way to monetize the Greylock Glen in order to make it a self-sustaining enterprise, those funds are going to be isolated in the revolving funds. So, there was questions over that, and frankly, it's a- You know, the term transparency gets bounced around a lot, but before people start throwing around the term transparency, they should really understand what the financial mechanisms are that we're trying to use, and that's really what it came down to. And we understand that, because municipal finance is a very unique beast, and if you're not well versed in it, or if it's not explained well, it can be misunderstood. The other part to that is a revolving fund, by Massachusetts General law, the way that the laws are established now, you have to authorize every year. You can't spend any more than x amount of dollars from a revolving fund. Well, you have to have money in the revolving fund first in order to determine how much you want to spend from it and have an idea as to what the cost load is going to be in any given year. We don't have that data. So, all we did at town meeting this year, Article 23, which passed by a large margin, if not unanimously, was to create a Chapter 50 revolving fund. So, we've created a revolving fund for the Greylock Glen. This will begin to isolate any revenue that we bring in, and then as our executive director is able to determine what the cost of operating the outdoor center and the rest of the Glen property are, will be able to pull invoices next fiscal year out from that. So once, I think, we explained all of that, town meeting under understood full well what we were trying to do,
Let's look at Adam's finances. How would you describe the push and pull of rising and falling costs for the community? Some things were down, some things were up. Can you sort of break down for us, looking at his fiscal year 2025, what the increases are and where they're going to be hitting the community?
Yes, we're standing in solidarity with all of our brother and sister communities here in the county. [We] saw fixed costs, insurance costs are going up, contractual obligations are going up. You know, people have to be paid a fair wage for what they do. So, we've been able to absorb those fixed costs, we've been able to absorb the added insurance costs, and we've been able to adjust wages accordingly this year for our DPW, which, frankly, you know, the entry level for a laborer in the Adams DPW as of this past year was $16.64. We're just now starting to pay our seasonal laborers $18, so we needed to adjust that. We've been able to do that this year, and in the coverage that you've provided, Josh, of other communities, along with your fellow media partners at the Eagle and iBerkshires, we're all in the same boat with it. So, we've done our best with it, we're living within the confines of Proposition Two and a Half, which is what we're required to do, and we were able to do that this year. We'll see what happens in the next year or two, and I'm pretty sure that my fellow town managers all feel the same about watching what these fixed costs are- Education. Education is a very expensive enterprise, but it's an enterprise that's needed for a community in order to thrive and attract homeownership and attract a greater commercial tax base. We have to watch all of that very carefully as we move along, because it's just getting expensive to run a municipality here in the commonwealth.
