Free cash — where it comes from, and how much is actually spendable

Where the money comes from

The Division of Local Services publishes a proof, not a summary: the components and the total, so the arithmetic can be shown rather than asserted. Five years, 1 July 2021 to 1 July 2025.

The share that is money appropriated and not spent went from 51% in 2021 to 66% in 2025. Underneath the whole series, local receipts came in above estimate in every one of the 5 years.

The state’s share is the small one, and the one that swings

Cherry sheet receipts — what the state actually paid against what the budget assumed it would — are 3.3% of five years of Lunenburg’s free cash. They are also the only named component that goes negative, and the town has the largest single-year move of the 9: $718,095.

Two publishers, one balance sheet, three different numbers

The Town prints its own version of this arithmetic in the annual report — an Undesignated Fund Balance Roll-forward, for the same 30 June. Both worksheets cross-foot exactly to their own printed totals, and one year’s closing balance is the next year’s opening one to the cent. They still land on different figures, and nothing published bridges them.

Neither document is wrong, and the Town’s is worth crediting. An add/deduct worksheet that ties to its own printed total in both places it claims to, in two consecutive annual reports, and hands its closing balance to the next year’s opening one to the cent, is a well-kept book. The difficulty below is that two well-kept books describe the same date and no third document joins them.

Is Lunenburg unusual? Only in composition — the level cannot be compared

So what compares is what each town’s free cash is made of, as a share of that town’s own identified total. One denominator per bar, and it is the town’s own.

On this measure Lunenburg is the highest of 9 in 2025 — but by a short way, in a cluster: 66% against Townsend 64%, Shirley 64%. Averaged over all 5 years it is second highest. The measure on which it is plainly an outlier is the next one.

Against its own history, the record year is the outlier

What the town said, in the same years

Both halves of the local argument are on the record, and the measurements above are the test of one of them. Every quote is checked against the minutes file it names when this page is built.

The Finance Committee’s own reading of local receipts and the state’s proof are two independent routes to the same measurement, and they agree: the estimate has been beaten every year. What neither settles is whether that is a choice. Every one of the 9 towns did the same thing in every one of the 5 years, which is what a convention looks like and also what nine independently conservative towns would look like.

So what could the town actually do with it?

Everything below is the projection, which is built from budget columns; everything above is derived from actuals. They are subtracted once, here, and the result is a deferral rather than a closed gap.

The level you hold barely matters. The policy is everything.

Move the slider and watch the second number stay still. That is the finding, and it is the opposite of how the argument is usually made.

• Holding a lower balance is a one-off. Going from today’s 6.55% to the bottom of the band releases $794,872 — once. Going below that releases more on paper and achieves nothing, because you cannot apply more free cash to a year than that year’s gap, and FY28’s gap is only $932,531.
• Appropriating the flow every year is the policy, and it is worth far more: it takes the six-year gap from $16,066,156 to $3,908,884. And it does not depend on the target at all. A lower target does not generate more money. It releases the accumulated stock sooner, and then you are living on the flow either way.

The catch, and it is the whole argument

That $2,026,212 a year is what an ordinary year generates — 3.96% of the budget, below the bottom of the band. And two thirds of it is money that was appropriated and never spent.

So the policy is self-cancelling at the edges: the flow you would spend every year is produced by the over-appropriating you would be trying to stop. Budget more tightly and the gap shrinks — but so does the free cash you were going to close it with. You cannot bank on both.

It changes the amount, not the direction

This site’s argument is that cuts change the amount and only rates change the direction. Free cash is in the same category as a cut, and weaker — a cut persists year after year; free cash is spent once and gone. The gap grows by roughly $602,566 a year, so even emptying the entire reserve — drawing to 0%, which nobody proposes — defers the problem two years and leaves the town with no reserve at all.

Is this the same as an override? No — they are opposites

The same dollars, spent once versus raised permanently. An override lifts the levy limit for good and the schools keep it every year after, growing at the 2.5% cap. Free cash is spent and gone.

Identical dollars. Over six years the override is worth $4,282,561 more, because it arrives every year and free cash arrives once.

But look at the last column, not the total. Even the override does not close the gap — it leaves $3,776,857 in FY33, and the shortfall grows every year. An override rises at 2.5%; the cost of running the schools rises faster. A permanent revenue increase loses ground more slowly than one-time money does, and still loses ground. That is the whole argument of this site in one table: only a change in the growth rates changes the direction.

And a normal year does not refill it

The 6.55% exists because one component was unusually large. Unspent appropriations in 2025 were $2,457,761 against a 2021–24 average of $986,340 — 2.49×, the biggest jump of 9 comparable towns, while 2 of them fell. Hold everything else constant and put that one line back at its own average, and the town certifies $2,026,212, which is 3.96% — below the bottom of the band.

That is the strongest thing in this data. Not that the balance is low, but that the flow which refills it does not clear the floor in an ordinary year. You can draw down to 5% once. Holding 5% while spending requires the underspending to continue — which would mean the budgeting problem continuing.

Two claims, both true, different windows

“This year, Lunenburg certified a record $3.354 million in free cash — 6.65% of the operating budget — well within DLS recommendations. In the last 10 years, Lunenburg has been below DLS free cash recommendations for seven years, only meeting this recommendation in 2022, 2023, and 2026.”

— Town of Lunenburg, FY27 budget press release, page 6

Somebody saying the town is sitting on money is describing this year. Somebody saying it is rebuilding is describing the decade. Neither has to be wrong.

The proof itself, cell by cell

Every row of Lunenburg’s free cash proof, with the coordinate each amount was read from. 70 of these cells are re-opened in the workbook and matched against this table when the page is built.

What this cannot answer

Every limit above is registered rather than only written here, so it reaches the request letter, the API and /what-we-cannot-answer as well as this page.

• money inWhy DLS certifies a different amount from the free cash its own proof identifies. The Division of Local Services’ free cash proof cross-foots exactly: in all 45 town-years of the nine-town set the eleven component lines sum, to the cent, to the workbook’s own `Identified Free Cash July 1,`. But that is not the figure DLS certifies. `Current Year Calculation` — the number the Town quotes, the number the Finance Director announced, and the number that carries into the next year — differs from it in all 45, by $361,912 for Lunenburg in 2025 and by 69% for Uxbridge in 2024. The workbook prints no reconciling line, and nothing in this archive states what the adjustment is. — closes: DLS’s free cash certification letter to the Town, which states the adjustments made between the balance sheet the Town submitted and the amount certified.
• money inWhich departments’ unspent appropriations produced the free cash. Money appropriated and not spent is the largest single component of Lunenburg’s free cash — 47% of five years of it, and 66% of the record 2025 certification. It is published as one town-wide figure across 67 departments. Prudence, a post left vacant, a project that slipped into the next year and a line that was over-budgeted from the start are four different facts about the world and one number on the page. — closes: the period 13 general ledger, showing budget, expended and turnback for each department at the year-end close.
• money inHow much of free cash is the schools’. Free cash is certified for the town as a whole. Neither the DLS proof nor the Town’s own undesignated fund balance roll-forward attributes any component to any department, so nothing published says how much of it the school department’s unspent appropriation produced — nor how much of any appropriation of it reaches the schools. The projection on this site is built from budget columns and free cash is derived from actuals; they are subtracted once, side by side, and never joined. — closes: a departmental turnback schedule for the year-end close, which would split the unexpended appropriations line by department.
• money inWhether Lunenburg’s free cash is unusual for a town its size. The DLS proof carries no denominator — no population, budget, revenue or levy for any of the nine towns, Lunenburg included. So Littleton’s $11.3M against Shirley’s $272K says nothing about which is closer to its own target, and free cash as a share of the operating budget cannot be computed for a peer at all. Composition and volatility are ratios and do compare; the level does not, and is not shown. — closes: the Tax Rate Recapitulation (Schedule A) for each town, which prints the operating budget the ratio needs.
• money inWhy the Town’s undesignated fund balance and DLS’s free cash differ. Two publishers describe the same 30 June balance sheet and print three different figures. The Town’s annual report roll-forward gives an undesignated fund balance of $4,236,488.24 at 30 June 2025; DLS identifies $3,716,282 of free cash on the same date and certifies $3,354,370. Each worksheet cross-foots exactly to its own printed total, and the FY2024 report’s closing balance is the FY2025 report’s opening one to the cent — so neither is in error, and no document in this archive prints a line between any pair of the three. — closes: the Town’s free cash submission to DLS (the balance sheet and the reconciliation of receivables and deferred revenue that accompanies it).
• peopleWhether a budgeted position was filled. A budget line is money the town has to raise, not a person in a chair. A line funded all year for a post vacant half of it looks identical on the page to one that was filled. Bounded, not settled: the rosters show who was printed, which narrows the question without answering it. — closes: a filled-position list, or payroll by position rather than by name.

What is ours, and what is not

• The band is single-sourced. Town of Lunenburg, FY27 budget press release, page 6, quoting DLS. This is the only source in the archive for the 5-7% band, and it is the Town quoting the state rather than the state itself. At a lower threshold this balance is above the range rather than inside it, and the count of years the town fell short moves with it.
• The denominator is soft. The Town publishes 6.65%, implying a base of $50,441,654; the FY26 original appropriation gives 6.55% and the revised budget slightly less. We cannot reproduce the Town’s base.
• The years are labelled differently. DLS dates free cash to the 1 July it is certified; the Town dates it to the fiscal year it can be spent in. They are one year apart.
• The projection and free cash never meet in a calculation. The gap is built from budget columns; free cash is derived from actuals. They are placed side by side and subtracted, and the result is deferral, not a closed gap.
• No breakdown exists. For the $2,457,761 of unspent appropriations there is a town-wide total across 67 departments and nothing more. Whether it is a few departments with vacancies or a systematic over-appropriation is the one question that would settle the argument, and nobody publishes it.

The series on this page are generated by scripts/build_free_cash_charts.py from sources/data/lunenburg.db — free_cash_proof, money_gaps; the annual town reports for the Town’s own roll-forward; sources/meetings/text/ for what was said. 630 rows, 9 towns, 5 years, 14 lines each.