BOE/BOS/BOF meeting summary and bond issues

The BOS/BOE/BOF met tonight from 7:30-8:45 at the Adams Choral room.

The discussion centered exclusively on Guilford's bond rating with a presentation from Mike McKinney and Bill Lindsey who have been Guilford's bond consultants since 1989.

Guilford is in the top 3-8% of communities for bond rating, and is in extremely good shape in terms of the wealth of the community and lack of debt.

Guilford could improve its fund balance (essenitally the amount of reserves) in order to maintain an excellent rating. The fund balance is currently about $3.4M, down from $7.4M in 2002. The fund balance has been drawn down five out of the last seven years, and has decreased from ~13% to under 7%, which is among the lowest of comparable communities. As long as a policy is in place to rebuild the fund balance it should be possible to maintain the rating. Carl Balestracci stated that the Board of Selectman is working on a draft of this policy.

I was personally surprised that given the opportunity to get all three boards together to discuss the school issue and the first gathering of the boards following the BOE recommendation that the only topic discussed was the bond rating. While undoubtedly the details of the bond rating and resultant interest rates are of importance there was no discussion of the BOE proposal, of timeline, or any outline of the process to work out the many other important facets of this process that will have to be decided prior to a referendum, though I assume those discussions are forthcoming.