Thanks Carol re: your questions on the Moody's rating.
There are several components to a Moody's rating, one of which is the amount of reserves. They have asked Towns to keep 20% reserves per their definition (Moody's Available Reservers). The Comptroller has definitively answered this question: We can spend up to $11.2m without having an issue with MAR. And even if we did get past the 20% MAR line, that would create a discussion with Moody's and risk to our rating not an automatic downgrade.
The reason for that is that there are other factors that drive the rating, the other two most of important of which are:
-- The tax base of the town (driven by asset values and per capita income -- both of which are well above the state average).
-- Our long-term liabilities (bonded debt, which is reasonable; pension and OPEB, which are ahead of plan on a combined basis - with the unfunded pension liability to be paid off at the end of FY 27).
There are valid public policy reasons to use different levels of free cash. But at the levels we are discussing here, our bond rating is safe.
Finally, re: Rich's point, both circuit breaker and free cash are one-time sources -- so no difference there. It is true that circuit breaker does not affect the MAR figure at all (while free cash does), though I would note that fully funding the WPS ask with no circuit breaker would cost ~$4.5m against +$11m of usable free cash.
Just to reiterate: I would strongly argue we should debate the acceptable use of free cash and what (if any) comes from circuit breaker on the relative public policy merits, and not on the basis of our bond rating, which is really a non-factor.
