The money

There is $10.03M outside the budget Town Meeting votes.

Town Meeting votes an appropriation. Beside it the town runs 199 separate funds that take in money of their own — grants, fees, gifts, water and sewer charges — and carry whatever is left over into the next year. In FY23 they received $9,102,808 and were holding $10,031,100 on 30 June. This is thirteen consecutive years of that schedule, FY11 to FY23, read out of the town’s own annual reports.

What the thirteen years say

Four claims, each one a movement of dollars in this schedule and nothing more. Why any of them happened is a separate question the schedule cannot answer, and the boxes below each section say so specifically.

• 1

  These funds took in more than they spent in 12 of 13 years, and what they hold multiplied 3.6×.

  Receipts rose 1.5× — from $6,127,226 in FY11 to $9,102,808 in FY23. The balance carried at year end rose further, from $2,766,955 to $10,031,100, because in 12 of the 13 years more came in than went out. The only exception is FY12, when the funds spent $704,333 more than they received.

• 2

  34% of what is being held is pandemic-era money, and this series ends before we can see whether it has gone.

  8 funds — ARPA, the ESSER rounds and the rest of a list of 10 names we identify as pandemic-era — held $3,377,339 of the $10,031,100 carried into FY24. They received $2,429,745 in FY23 and spent $876,067. Before FY20 they did not exist. The schedule stops at FY23, so nothing here shows what happened when that money ran out — and which funds are “pandemic” is our reading of the printed names, listed in full below.

• 3

  Most of it is not school money, and a large part of it is not even the general town either — it is water, sewer and trash.

  The five enterprise funds sit inside this same schedule until FY23 and held $3,800,195, or 38% of the total. The school department’s own funds held $1,753,708, or 17%. Anyone quoting the $10,031,100 as school reserves is quoting the sewer fund.

• 4

  FY23 was the first year since FY17 that the school funds spent more than they took in.

  In FY23 the district’s funds received $3,667,636 and spent $4,333,280 — $665,644 more out than in — and the balance stood at $1,753,708 against $2,416,360 at its highest, the end of FY22. A year in which these funds spent more than they received has happened in 5 of the 13 years here: FY11, FY12, FY13, FY17, FY23.

Money in, money out

Each pair of bars is one fiscal year: everything these 314 named funds received, against everything they paid out. Both are the town’s own printed column totals, and the reconciliation below shows every year tying to them.

A receipt here is money arriving in a fund, not revenue the town can spend on anything it likes. Most of these funds are restricted by the grant, the statute or the by-law that created them.

What is being held, and whose it is

The same thirteen years, but the balance carried forward on 30 June rather than the year’s flow — a stock, not a flow, which is why it is a second chart rather than a second axis. It is cut four ways. Three of the four are our reading of the printed fund names and are listed in full underneath; the fourth is the department heading the report itself prints.

The school department’s own funds

School lunch, school choice, extended day, athletics, the special education tuition account, the federal grants and the gift funds — 71 of them in FY23 against 77 in FY11. Each bar is a year’s receipts minus its disbursements: above the line the balances grew, below it they were drawn down. Across all thirteen years these funds received $38,352,934 and spent $37,256,774.

These figures include the district’s ESSER grants, which the band chart above counts separately. That is the whole of the difference between $1,753,708 here and $1,721,325 there.

The biggest movers, FY11 to FY23

97 funds are printed under the same name in both the first and the last edition, and this is how far each one’s carried balance moved between them. Only those 97 can be compared at all: a fund whose name changed is a broken series, not a fund that closed.

Which funds accumulate, and which run themselves down

94 funds are printed in every one of the 13 editions; these are the 24 of them that took in the most over the period. A fund appearing twice can look like it always overspends on a sample of two, so the ones printed every year are the only ones long enough to have a habit. 5 of these 24 spent more than they received across the thirteen years; the largest net accumulation among them is Sewer Enterprise Fund, $1,076,146 over the period.

Every fund, every year

All 1882 rows, exactly as the reports print them: brought forward, plus receipts, minus disbursements, equals carried forward. Pick a year and a department.

How this was read, and how it was checked

These figures were read off the rendered page of each annual report rather than run through OCR. That makes them an instrument’s output, with exactly the standing of an OCR result — so two independent checks decide whether a year is publishable at all, and a year that fails either one is not on this page.

Three things to know before quoting any of this

Where this came from

13 annual town reports, one schedule each. Every figure on this page is recomputed from /data/special-revenue.json when the site is built, by scripts/build_special_revenue.py, from sources/data/special-revenue-read.csv. The dataset’s own provenance note — what it is, how a year is added, and what it deliberately excludes — is sources/data/PROVENANCE-special-revenue-read.md. In the published database the tables are special_revenue_read and special_revenue_printed_totals.

Two spellings of one department appear in the printed schedules — HIGHWAY DEPT. in the early editions and HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT later — and 29 rows are merged into one heading here. That is our rendering of the town’s page, not something the page says.