Hi all, this is your Town Manager Alex Torpey with your June update. I hope you're staying cool this week at least as I'm recording this, and everyone is enjoying the early summer.

We've got a lot to cover in this month, including:

• May and June Selectboard meetings, including updates on:
  • Several public hearings to accept unanticipated grant funds
  • Selectboard organizational meeting and planning
  • FY25 Rates and Fees
  • Allen Street Placemaking Pilot
  • Several ordinance updates related to traffic, parking, and more
  • Appointments
  • Donations
  • Various business including approving minutes, banner requests and such
• My June monthly report, which are now all easily available on the Town Manager page on our website, with updates on:
  • Upcoming events on Allen Street
  • Human Resources, current entering and exiting employees, vacancies, new Fire Chief appointment, trainings, and more
  • Budget and finance updates, including audit updates
  • Housing, redevelopment and planning updates, including updates on proposed RFEI's for housing and parking
  • Transportation and mobility, including on some summer construction projects,
  • Downtown Hanover, on formalizing group structure and more
  • College and Town, including on upcoming free public wifi downtown
  • And other updates from JAM/CATV, about trash and recycling, and the...

This is your Town Manager Alex Torpey here. Have you heard about the Allen Street Placemaking Pilot?

From June 26-August 26, 2024, the Hanover Selectboard has authorized a two-month pilot closure of Allen Street building off the success and positive feedback of the "Block Party" series. The purpose of the Allen Street Placemaking Pilot is to promote community engagement, enhance pedestrian safety, and support local businesses by temporarily closing Allen Street to vehicular traffic. This will allow for public use and activities, outdoor dining, and the creation of vendor spots to bring additional vibrancy to the area.

Throughout the pilot, we will measure various impact(s) such as traffic, parking, general activity, and more, and use that to inform any future decisions. This idea was generated through the inclusive collaboration of Town officials and local business owners through the Downtown Working Group and aligns with the goals in Chapters 6 and 7 of the new Master Plan and the Selectboard's FY25 Goals #3.

In this episode, I share a brief background, and then we hear from Hannah and Liz from Hanover Parks and Rec about all the great stuff happening this summer from concerns to events, to family/kid activities, outdoor dining, and much more.

After we hear from Hannah and Liz, we hear from six downtown business/property owners what they think.

We hear from:

• Jim Rubens, Hanover resident and owner of Hanover Park at 3 Lebanon Street
• Jay Campion, Hanover resident and downtown property owner
• Paula Fernandes, owner of My Brigadeiro
• David Barrette, Hanover resident and owner of Main Street Kitchens
• Kieran Campion, Hanover resident General Manager of Sawtooth Kitchen
• Jarett Berke, Hanover resident and owner of Lou's Restaurant (and Selectboard member)

Not all business/property owners we reached out provided comments, and of course, not everyone is entirely on board with the project, as there are some who have expressed concerned about impacts to parking and ability for vehicles and visitors to get to their spaces or tenants. The Town has been working diligently with all property and business owners to understand and make sure these concerns can be monitored, have provided survey forms for feedback, and are communicating with stakeholders every two weeks as well...

In what will surely be the shortest podcast episode I've ever or will ever record, please join me, your Town Manager Alex Torpey, as I briefly read out the letter to the editor submitted to the Valley News last week.

In the letter and recording, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the people who participated passionately but civilly. In the true spirit of several centuries of Town Meetings in New Hampshire, we thank all voters who showed up, treated their fellow community members with empathy and respect, and made decisions on behalf of the future of our community.

Hi everyone this is your Town Manager Alex Torpey.

In this episode I give a quick run down of the results from yesterday's election and Town Meeting, thank some of the folks who helped put all of that together, and thank all of you for your engagement and caring about your community.

You can find the results posted at hanovernh.org as well.

In this episode of Hanover Happenings I sit down with Selectboard Chair Athos Rassias to run through the Warrant for 2024 Town Meeting.

Athos and I discuss a little bit about his time serving on the Selectboard and involvement in Hanover's School Board and Finance Committee, why Hanover is such a cycling paradise, who is better Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift, and then we run through the entire ballot and Warrant and explanations for Town Meeting. Go one episode back for a budget overview, which we don't spend much time on in this episode.

Town Meeting is Tuesday May 14th at HHS. Ballot voting from 7a-7p, and the business meeting to begin at 7pm.

There is a public candidate forum open house discussion on May 9th from 5-7pm at the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth, hosted by Dartmouth Civics, where you can meet candidates learn about Town government/meeting, how to get more involved, and ask questions of various Town staff and volunteers.

Additional Resources are available at Hanovernh.org/Townmeeting. This includes:

• Town Warrant
• Explanatory Information
• Full Town Report
• Layout for parking/walking to HHS
• Voter registration information

You can find all budget information: hanovernh.org/budget.

In this episode I sit down with Ellen Bullion, Finance Director, to talk some budget!

We start off with a basic Budget 101 - revenue/appropriations, operating/capital, how the budget leads to the tax rate, and some differences between private and public sector budgeting.

We then move on to cover a very broad overview of the FY25 budget, and the "Top 12" highlights of things to keep an eye on in the FY25 budget that was approved by the Selectboard on April 1st, and endorsed by the Finance Committee.

What we cover in this episode will be largely mirrored in the Town Report as well.

Then we discuss the many backup documents that contain more information if you want more on any specific topic. We summarize some of the key ones below. The available backup documents can all be accessed at hanovernh.org/budget:

• A full Excel Workbook of the budget. This is broken down by department, includes a summary tab, and tax rate calculation tab. You can see down to the account level across the organization.
• All slides and videos from the budget presentations. These include department presentations and plans, budget highlights, social service applications, and more. It’s a lot of information – three meetings of more than three hours each.
• All items not included in the budget. Over $600,000 of evaluated budget requests were not included in the budget due to affordability constraints. This memo outlines what items weren’t included, why, and what may be evaluated in future years.
• Updated Undesignated Fund Balance tracking. These include a revised tracking sheet that looks at the ‘surplus’ funds in each of the Town’s funds.
• A new draft template for tracking personnel levels. This draft of a new tracking template includes information such as FTEs, headcount, PTO utilization, and more, meant to give a sense of the staffing levels and pressure on the organization and trends over time.
• Retention and Recruitment memo. This is a somewhat more detailed memo on the Retention and Recruitment issues and personnel costs.
• The full report of the newly formed Capital Improvement Program Committee. This is the first year that Hanover has been in compliance for capital planning, and the multi-stakeholder group that reviewed the capital requests has an even bigger job in coming years to incorporate all of the cost items that haven’t been included before. This is the Town’s most transparent capital plan so far, and you can read the full report (it’s long) or the summary.
• Memo summarizing the FY22 audit and related issues. The FY22 was recently completed, and identified a number of serious, but resolvable, issues in how the Town has been conducting accounting practices. Through collaboration with the Finance Committee and Selectboard, this resulted in a new accounting position added to the Town organizational chart to both help fix these issues and prevent issues from arising in the future.
• A summary of the union contracts. These are the first multi-year contracts in some time, agreed to through a more collaborative approach, and in line with the updates policies and programs offered to all Town staff.
• Links to the Town’s Master Plan. These documents are important planning documents, and one of the goals in the FY25 budget was to not only connect budget items to the Selectboard’s goals, but the Master Plan as well.

In this episode I discuss the importance of civic engagement and recap a project several dozen state and local officials worked recently to produce a produce a free, nonpartisan guide on how to boost participation at Town Meeting. It was covered on NHPR and you can download the guide at nhtownmeeting.com.

In the episode we cover the phrase “Authentic and effective public engagement” and why it’s important to have shared definitions of terms such as these. We go through some of the reasons behind the handbook, and then go through the five best practices we identified, as well as some quotes from local officials in NH and VT who have put these in practice in their communities. This all should help give some background to why these sorts of efforts are so important to the Selectboard and all of us in the Town government in Hanover.

Press release below:

State and local officials work together to increase Town Meeting participation in NH

Two weeks after New Hampshire's 104th first-in-the-nation primary, the focus now shifts to another hallmark of state leadership: Town Meeting. As more than two hundred New Hampshire communities gear up for this traditional event, they celebrate one of the world's purest forms of democracy, where residents directly participate in legislative decisions from budgets, zoning, and more. Through this process of governing, often joined by shared meals and community awards, Granite Staters sustain the small-town unity that historically has been such a big part of our state’s culture of involvement at the local level.

Despite its roots in the 1600s and a cornerstone of local engagement, Town Meeting still faces challenges similar to those affecting civic systems nationwide, with declining attendance worrying officials who champion its significance. In response, a nonpartisan coalition of state and local officials has compiled a handbook that aims to make some well- tested best practices more widely accessible.

“I came to New Hampshire with a requirement to work in a town with Town Meeting.” Hanover’s Town Manager Alex Torpey, who moved to the Upper Valley from New Jersey in 2022, explains the impetus for the project. “I’ve been fascinated with the process for years, and since coming here, have learned so much from the experience of others who have been leaders in their communities for years or decades. I also heard a lot of differing ideas from people about declining numbers, and what the rules and best practices are, which we wanted to organize and provide to anyone interested.”

The best practices were sourced from nearly two dozen Town Managers, Clerks, and Moderators in New Hampshire, as well as Vermont, through organizations such as the Municipal Management Association of New Hampshire and the New Hampshire City and Town Clerks Association, as well as independently. The handbook was reviewed by the New Hampshire Municipal Association, New Hampshire Secretary of State, and the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration. The New Hampshire Attorney General’s office provided advice about the project as well, though they did not perform a review of the handbook, specifically.

Hey folks, this is your Town Manager Alex Torpey here with a bit of a late update for December and Happy New Year, and January 2024. How it's 2024 already I have no idea, but we'll have to save that for a different podcast.

A lot has been happening in the last month, though much of that has been really on the staff side, both working on turning the data and feedback from our retention and recruitment study into proposals and then budgeting them out and working with our collective bargaining units and staff and selectboard to move forward, so with that and a few persistent vacancies in some key positions, we've all been a bit flat out and probably will continue to be like that until we get the budget adopted by the Selectboard in March.

Here's some of what we covered in our meetings in December and January:

• We discussed some budget, finance, and audit updates, which I'll come back with an up to date summary as of January 23rd
• We held the final public hearings and finished some cleanup on a bunch of easements that had been sort of floating around for years, using the RSA 41:14a process that was approved at Town Meeting last year
• We discussed and the Selectboard, as well as Planning Board, reviewed and sent letters to the state legislature regarding the religious-use exemptions
• We discussed some election requirements for the primary, appointed volunteers, and then had our election on January 23rd
• We completed a bunch of other logistical business which you can find online if so interested, the 2024 calendar, minutes, donations, unanticipated revenues, banners, and the like
• We did finally grant the tax exemption to the Friends of Hanover Crew, if anyone was following that, where they updated their bylaws to be in compliance with the advice our attorney gave us as what was needed to grant such the exemptions.
• Proclamation for retiring employee
• Plus my Town report, including
  
  • HR Numbers in/out
  • HR Retention and Recruitment
  • Fire Chief hiring
  • Flex schedul...