The money

How the money actually moves

A budget line is not what a thing costs. It is what the town has to raise — what is left after state aid, grants, fees and the district’s own revolving funds have paid their share. The budget documents show that one number and none of the others.

So a line can rise because the thing got more expensive, because a grant that was paying part of it ended, or because a fee stopped being collected — and all three look identical on the page. Beside general education transportation the district’s own workbook asks, in its comments column, whether that line already reflects a reduction for money expected from busing fees — and nothing on the page marks which other lines are net of anything.

These pages are about the routes, not about what to do next. Where a route can be followed in the town’s ledger, they follow it. Where it cannot, they say where it stops instead of estimating across the gap. Nothing here tells you which source paid for which line: money in the general fund loses its origin on arrival, and no record in the archive puts it back.

What the town should do about any of it is the other door — .

The documents

Written by this project, not by the town or the district. Every figure on these pages is computed from sources/data/lunenburg.db or from the documents in the archive, and a page with no generator listed is hand-written — its figures were true when it was written and nothing checks that they still are.

School Money Flow →html · 37 KBFY2026 drawn end to end: every source the town budgets, the 258 accounts the school department spends from, and the connection in the middle nobody records.regenerated by scripts/build_money_flow.py, scripts/build_town_flow.pyTown Money Flow →html · 61 KBThe same model applied to all of Lunenburg — the general fund, the enterprise funds and the special revenue funds, in one picture.regenerated by scripts/build_town_flow.py

Going further

Follow The Money →Every route into the school budget and out the other side, level by level, and the level at which each trail goes cold.Where every dollar lands, and who decides — Lunenburg FY2026 →Where each dollar comes to rest and who actually gets to decide how it is spent — the question the budget documents never answer.The town’s ledger — structure, naming, and every trap in it →How the town’s ledger is built and named: what an account number means, what a fund number means, and why a name in it must never be used to identify anything.

What is not in here

The most useful thing this project can say about the town’s money is which parts of it the published records cannot answer. That list is kept as data rather than as prose, so it is the same list the diagrams are built against — and it has a page of its own, alongside what has been read without being checked and what the Town has been asked for and has not sent.