Town Money Flow

Nothing on this page is aggregated

Every one of the 67 departments and every one of the 21 active funds has its own box. That is why the diagram is tall — it is the honest shape of a town with that many of each, and a shorter picture would be a shorter picture of something else.

School money is orange, everywhere. That is the point of the town view: once anything is combined you can no longer see what goes to the school and what does not. Scroll the right column and the schools are visible as a colour rather than as a number you have to trust.

Every special revenue fund the town has is a school fund, so the entire lower half of both columns is orange. The general fund half is where the town’s other 64 departments live.

Can this page say “here is every way money comes in, itemised”?

Not quite, and the difference matters. It is classified, not itemised. Each box on the left is a group: the five general-fund classes stand for 79 revenue accounts that carry money, and 113 more that carry none. On the right, ten departments are named and 57 are collapsed into one box. Inside each department are the 635 accounts the ledger actually holds.

So the honest claim is: every dollar the town’s ledger records is on this page somewhere, at the grain a page can hold. What it is not is a list you could audit a cheque against.

And eight things are not on it at all, because the town’s records cannot answer them. They are drawn at the foot of each column, at the same size as everything else, so the picture does not read as complete when it is not. Four are money coming in that cannot be seen; four are spending that cannot be split. Every one of them is a real quantity — none is a rounding difference or a missing file.

The largest single unknown is the school share of the pension. The largest lumped one is debt service: two accounts for all town borrowing, with school buildings inside and no way to separate them.

Every dollar of special revenue in this town is school money

The single box marked “Special revenue funds — $1,553,151” on the left is not a town-wide category with a school share inside it. It is entirely school money. Twelve funds carry revenue in FY2026 — school lunch, the special education circuit breaker, extended day, Chapter 658 athletics, after school, school choice, family and community engagement, the school gift fund, facilities use, comprehensive school health, adult education, and lost books — and no other town department runs one at all.

Which is why the school page itemises these and this page does not: same money, finer grain, and the school page is where the grain belongs. The one thing this page does not carry that the school page does is the grant funds’ spending — nine funds that spent money in FY2026 while booking no revenue, so a revenue-side box cannot show them. They appear here only in the gaps.

What is inside the special revenue box, itemised

The diagram carries these as one box on each side because there are 21 of them and a box each would swamp the picture. Nothing is excluded from the totals — every fund below is inside the $1,736,376, and each of these is school money.

School choice, for example, took in $83,116, spent $30,558 and holds $299,461 — all three inside the single box on the diagram.

The town runs four money systems that do not mix

This is the thing the school view cannot show, because the schools live in only two of them.

The asymmetry is the finding. The system nobody argues about — the enterprise funds — is fully traceable, because it is rate-funded and ring-fenced. The system every Town Meeting argues about is the one where no dollar can be followed from where it came from to what it bought. That is not an accident of record-keeping; it is what a general fund IS.

What the town view shows that the school view cannot

• Scale. The school department is 53% of the omnibus budget once the library is counted with it — more than everything else the town does, combined.
• The enterprise funds are the control case. Rate-funded, ring-fenced, traceable. They prove the tracing problem is a property of the general fund rather than of the town’s record-keeping.
• Two revenue lines are 83% of everything. Property tax and Chapter 70. The other 190 accounts share the rest, and 113 of them carry nothing.
• The same gaps recur outside the schools. Debt service is two lumped accounts for all town borrowing; capital is two transfer lines with no project detail; the pension covers everybody with no split. These are not school problems, they are how the town books things.

The schools, in the same model

Reproduced from school-money-flow.html unchanged, so the two can be read against each other. The school system is one of the four above and lives in two of them: the general fund appropriation, and the special revenue funds it runs itself.

Open the school diagram →

Where this page comes from

Every document behind the figures above. This list is recorded while the page is built — SQLite reports each table the render actually reads, and the documents come off doc_id on the rows themselves, so it cannot drift away from what the page does. All 16 were traced that way.

Addresses resolve on the published site; the archive is also mirrored on GitHub. A sha256 is here because a file can be replaced at the same URL — see rule 12.