By BILL CHAISSON
[email protected]
NEWPORT — At their Nov. 19 meeting the Newport select board decided to replace their accounting software, the first such change since 1999. The board heard Paul Brown, the town’s finance director, describe the new product, asked him several pointed questions about it, and ultimately told him to go ahead with the contract, the funding for which has already been approved.
Brown received 10 proposals and reduced this list to three finalists, which he then examined in depth. He settled on software administrated by Edmunds and Associates of Northfield, New Jersey. Brown said the firm has 800 clients up and down the East Coast, but Newport would be their first customer in New Hampshire. The deciding element of their product, Brown said, was the “municipal dashboard” that they include as a standard element of their package.
“The public will be able to log in to the town site,” the finance director said, “and look for financial data.” He added that the numbers would be raw and unprocessed at first and then would be updated as he and his staff refined them. The public, he admitted, would not be able to tell the difference between the raw and more refined numbers.
“On our current software,” said select board chair Jeffrey Kessler, “there is no log of when things have been changed. With this [software] things can’t be manipulated without leaving a trail, right?” Brown said that was correct.
Kessler wanted to know what kind of training Edmunds and Associates would provide. Brown said that he and Finance Assistant Theresa Lavoie would receive five days of training. He told the board that the transition to the new system would take place in January 2019. The vendor would be transferring five years worth of balances and all the information for vendors that the town had used in the last two years (~2,500) from the old software into the new.
“What is the benefit to the taxpayer?” Kessler asked.
“Well,” said Brown, “it will be less costly because the service contracts are less, and it gives them [taxpayers] a chance to get into some real-time data and dig around in our finances a little bit.” Brown said that the initial cost for the software, training and conversion to the new system will cost $20,000 and the annual maintenance fee is $4,800. Brown had decided to keep the financial information on site rather than store it “in the cloud,” which entailed purchasing a new server with several “virtual servers.”
“If we need to bail out the school district,” said Kessler, “and take over their finances, as we keep expecting to do, would this software be able to do that?”
Brown had not spoken with Edmunds and Associates about that eventuality, but he supposed that there would be additional fees for included a “separate company.” Kessler was unperturbed: “It’s not an immediate concern.”
Todd Fratzel, the vice chair of the board, said his company had recently gone to a cloud-based service because it had been too difficult for them to maintain the necessary hardware. He said his company had been quite satisfied with the stability of the system and suggested that cloud-based services were “the wave of the future.”
Brown reiterated his discomfort with remote (“cloud”) storage of financial information, primarily for security reasons, but also because he did not want to be unable to get to information during power outages.
Selectman John Hooper seconded Fratzel’s endorsement of a cloud-based service, saying his own company was looking into switching over to one. “The price of servers is just crazy,” he said, “compared to the cost of these storage places.”
Brown stuck to his position, telling the board that the town had to maintain its own servers regardless and that the accounting information simply required “a bit more capacity.”
The finance director told the board that he needed a decision before Dec. 1, but he didn’t have to wait long. “If your boss [Town Manager Hunter Rieseberg] is good with it,” Kessler said, “then we’re good with it.”
Other business
Brown’s financial report was brief. He said that the revenues for the water and sewer systems looked “all right.” The rate increases that the board passed in October had helped the town meet projections. The water rate had increased 10 percent and the sewer rate 15 percent. He cited declining usage as a problem.
The town tax rate has not yet been set. Kessler said he was waiting to hear from the school district, which had not finalized its rate. Brown pronounced the situation to be out of his hands, but he hoped to have something by the first week of December.
Fratzel brought the board up to date on progress toward a new community center. The designers, Breadloaf, had fit the proposed new building onto the same parcel with the baseball field, although it had required rotating the orientation of the field by about 180 degrees. Fratzel said that the feasibility study for the project had recommended a two-story 30,000 square-foot building, but the design he was showing the board was a one-story 19,000 square-foot structure that he felt answered the town’s needs. It, for example, included changing rooms, but not full locker rooms with showers, and featured several multi-purpose spaces.
Fratzel gave his audience a virtual tour through the floor plan. He described an exercise room that would not have a lot of equipment in it. “We don’t want to put a lot of fitness equipment in,” he said, “because we don’t want to put anyone out of business. Something like that happened in Claremont.”
He did not mention any figures related to cost, but “once we have something to show people, the fundraising should be easier.” ( Representatives from Breadloaf Architects were in Newport on Nov. 28 to give a presentation to the select board.)
The board had only one action item on their agenda. They voted to remove an obligation for a new owner to follow covenants that had been placed on a property at 1 Sandy Lane. When the neighborhood was developed in the 1940s, the town had insisted on weighing in on setbacks and home sizes. Although those had been superseded by Newport’s zoning ordinance, the purchaser’s attorney had requested that the town manager sign a contract that assured him and his client that the covenants would not be invoked. The select board gave Rieseberg permission, and he noted that all the court costs and fees associated with the property would be reimbursed to the town.
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