Finance Committee Starts Subcommittee on Approaching Market Baskets

Westford has two Market Baskets, but when it comes to its town budget and how it is examined, it might have many more, or even none at all.

For the Finance Committee, market baskets (lowercase) are other communities used for comparisons in budget purposes, not supermarkets. And the issue of how they should be used in building a town budget was a key topic of discussion at their meeting on Monday night.

The discussion arose from an earlier discussion between the Finance Committee, the Board of Selectmen and the School Committee recently aiming to kick start the town budget process in the hopes of avoiding last year’s last minute decisions on what would go before Town Meeting voters.

Finance Committee member Jerry Koehr volunteered create a subcommittee from members of the town’s boards to investigate and provide more data to the board on the issue, although there was a consensus that the topic needs to be addressed to avoid confusion during the budget process as well as on the floor of town meeting.

Although it appears that they will be used in some way when it comes to crafting budgets, it still remains to be seen how they will be used.

Selectman Val Wormell was quick to point out that in other parts of town government, such as the policies of the Public Works Initiative Committee, market baskets are never used on their own as a guide for analysis.

What towns will be used as market baskets is also likely to be a source of discussion, with Finance Committee member James Conry recommending that some towns that could be statistical outliers in certain ways like Concord and Wellesley not be considered at all.

“If you throw out the outliers and ask what this tells us to look at for Westford, not to make value judgments, but to highlight certain functional areas, the devil is in the details,” said Conry.

Whatever the final determinations are for determining market baskets, the focus is likely to be fixed on the School Department budget.  

Earlier in the meeting, Chairman Mike Princi stated that the board will attempt to start a joint School Committee/Finance Committee group to collect data as well as a discussion with School Committee chairman David Keele to find an impartial liaison tasked with articulating budget predictions among other goals for this year’s budget cycle.