WESTFIELD -The City Council will conduct a special meeting on Monday at 6 p.m. to consider a number of loose-end financial issues and to close the books for the end of city’s 2014 fiscal year. The challenge with that effort is the number of moving parts.
The Council’s Finance Committee is slated to meet at 5:30 p.m. Monday to act on a number of appropriations which have been stuck in that committee, in some cases since May. Several of the pending appropriations are from the city’s free cash account.
The Monday session is further complicated by the request of Mayor Daniel M. Knapik to “sweep” remaining funds from free cash and the Reserved for Unforeseen accounts into the stabilization account so that funding is immediately available when the 2015 Fiscal Year budget begins Tuesday.
The amount remaining in stabilization will vary if the council approves any or all of the appropriations. Knapik said Friday that he anticipates the free cash account will have more than $2 million to be transferred to stabilization.
“It’s kind of a moving target because of the number of free cash requests on their agenda,” Knapik said. “(City Auditor) Deb (Strycharz) will reconcile the numbers after the meeting.
“The council will also have to vote again to move free cash into stabilization,” Knapik said. “They tried to do it at their last meeting (June 19) but an appropriation can only originate from the mayor, the council can’t originate an appropriation vote.
Knapik said that one of the appropriations held in the Finance Committee is a request to transfer $38,655.10 from the Reserve for Unforeseen account to the Technology Department to install equipment at Westfield High School to “make the wireless system more robust by the time the school opens this fall.”
The appropriation was discussed at the May 28 Finance Committee session where Lenore Bernashe presented detail of the project, explaining that the present 10-year-old system “is at the end of it life” and that the upgrade will provide the high school with a secure system.
“Our goal is to get it in over the summer,” Bernashe said. “We’ve been doing a major overhaul of technology at the high school and need the wireless system to support that.
Ward 5 Councilor Robert Paul Sr., a Finance Committee member and former Westfield Gas & Electric Municipal Light Board member, suggested taking no action on the appropriation to give Bernashe time to work with the WG&E on upgrading technology at schools citywide.
Knapik said that he had similar discussion with WG&E Manager Dan Howard on collaboration, but concluded that the skill sets and missions of the two department are so distinctly different that little, if any, overlap exists to exploit at this time.
The Council will have the opportunity to approve the second reading and final passage of the $7.5 million bond for construction of a new senior center on Noble Street.
The first reading of the bond was approved at the June 5 City Council session and Council on Aging officials had anticipated that the bond would be given the second reading and final passage at the June 19 meeting.
The state requires publication of a proposed bond at least 10 days prior to the meeting where final passage could be approved. The publication of the senior center bond did not occur until June 11, meaning the council could not act at the June 19 session.
There is also a 20-day appeal period following final passage of a bond, meaning that if the Council gives it authorization for the bond Monday, they can release the funding on July 20, allow site preparation and construction to start.
