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Highway operations: town officials describe plow hiring, salt purchases and capital-reserve rules
Summary
Select Board members described how the highway department hires seasonal plow drivers, maintains salt supplies and uses year-end encumbrances or capital reserves for equipment such as loaders and trucks. Residents asked about equipment timing and whether funds can be shifted between buckets.
Select Board members and residents discussed highway staffing and equipment funding, including seasonal plow drivers, salt purchases, encumbrances and capital-reserve rules.
Officials said the highway department hires seasonal plow drivers for winter and had approved two or three seasonal hires this winter. “So we do we do hire plow drivers just for the winter… I think it was 2 or 3,” a Select Board member said when asked about driver hiring.
On salt and encumbrances, Letty explained that the highway director could bring unspent 2024 budget money forward for specific contractual or operational needs: “Wayne's entire…salt predicted salt bill for this year, I think, was, like, over a hundred thousand dollars. We allowed him to use money that he had left in his budget in 2024 to bring into 2025 that he had to buy salt at this time of year.” The board described encumbrance rules: money can be carried forward only for legal obligations (contracts) and not as an open transfer of leftover departmental line items.
Board members also said the highway budget had been reduced from prior years because historical spending was lower than what had been budgeted; the board trimmed lines to align budgets more closely with expected expenditures and to limit tax impact. At the meeting a board member said combined cuts to the highway and sand-and-snow-control budgets totaled more than $40,000.
Residents asked about larger equipment purchases such as a loader and whether capital reserves and impact-fee funds could be moved between uses; the board explained capital-reserve funds are designated for specific purposes and cannot be repurposed without voter approval at town meeting. The board also said there is a mechanism to encumber funds for contract obligations that cross fiscal years (for example, a purchase with a signed contract where work is completed after the fiscal year end).
