The root cause
Lunenburg closed a budget gap for the year it is in, and a bigger one opens next year. That is not mismanagement and it is not bad luck — it is arithmetic that was always going to produce this, and it will produce it again next year, and the year after. Here is the mechanism, what each way out is genuinely worth, and why cutting stops being available at all in about six years.
Everything on this page runs on the district’s own published growth rates and the same cut cascade as the Priorities tab. The FY28 gap it starts from is $930,273.
The arithmetic
School costs rise
5.18%
a year, blended across everything the district buys
Revenue may rise
2.50%
a year, by Proposition 2½, plus whatever is newly built
Which leaves
2.68 pts
short every year, compounding. Nobody overspent — these are simply two different numbers.
The bar is each item’s growth rate; the number beside it is how much of the budget it is. The dotted line is the 2½% the town’s revenue is allowed to grow. Only one line on this list sits under it, and it is the smallest.
A gap is not something a town can have — Massachusetts budgets must balance, so every year it is either funded or cut. Those are two genuinely different futures and mixing them on one chart made both unreadable. Here they are apart. Notice that the fresh pain is almost identical either way, around $675k a year. What differs completely is what accumulates.
$9.27M
of permanent new revenue in place by FY37
Each year the town finds the fresh shortfall — $930,273 in FY28, rising to $1,075,189 by FY37 — and that money stays in the base, growing 2½% a year with everything else. Nothing is lost, so the fresh ask never explodes. What accumulates is the tax side: $9.27M a year of revenue that does not exist today, which is about $1,927 a year on the average tax bill.
$3.56M
of programs and 25.2 positions gone by FY33 — everything this model lists, but only 13% of the budget
Each year the district cuts the fresh shortfall instead — about $675k. Because a cut permanently lowers the base, the ask does not grow either. What accumulates here is the service side: every team, club, library, elective and named position this tool prices. That is 13% of the budget, not all of it — but it is every optional thing anyone has written down. After FY33 the cutting continues into classroom teachers, which is where it always ends.
Whichever way it is settled, the fresh ask stays about the same size every year. That is what makes the cutting route so misleading: closing the same gap annually does not shrink the gap, it shrinks the school district. The shortfall is a rate, so it renews; the cuts are a stock, so they accumulate.
Cut by FY33
$3,556,962
every optional thing anyone has written down — 13% of the budget. Not “all services”: the rest is teaching staff nobody has priced, and the cutting carries on into it.
Against a gap of
$746k
that year — so you will have given up 4.8× the size of the problem and still have the problem
And it never closes
FY34
opens with a gap like every year before it, only now there is nothing left on the list to close it with
The reason the cut list runs out so fast is that it was never very long. But be careful with the word “untouchable”: the FY27 balanced budget cut 9.2 staff positions including four classroom teachers, so salaries are demonstrably cuttable. What the 87% below really means is not enumerated in this model — and that distinction is what makes FY33 a limit of the list rather than a limit of reality.
Not enumerated here
87%
$23,015,326 of the $26,572,288 appropriation. Mostly the teaching staff this model does not price individually, plus health insurance, transport and out-of-district tuition. Cuttable — the town just did it.
On this model’s list
13%
$3,556,962 — every team, club, library, elective and administrative line, plus 6 classroom teachers and three custodians. Staff are on the list; there are just not many of them on it.
Mandated by law, in the catalogue
$439,203
The only mandated items this tool prices individually. Named in full below.
Also effectively fixed: 2 collectively bargained lines worth $760,950 — Additional Classroom Teachers and Custodial Staff. Cuttable in principle, only by reopening a contract.
The FY27 balanced budget eliminated 9.2 positions. This is the answer to “why not just cut teachers”: the town already did.
This model does not itemise the rest. The $22,576,123 outside the list is a residual, and it is mostly more of the same teaching staff. Its shape, from the district’s own expense base:
Salaries are two thirds of it. The list reaches a slice of those — 6 classroom teachers, three custodians, three paraprofessionals and the named specialists — and stops, which is a choice about how far to model, not a legal boundary. Health insurance, transport and out-of-district tuition are the genuinely fixed part, set by contract, by the insurance market or by law.
Drawn in dollars rather than shares, because every percentage available here has this model’s own list as its denominator. The blue sliver is what is left on that list; the band above it is the rest of the budget, growing the whole time. The squeeze is real and it is that shape — a shrinking set of options inside a rising cost base.
The list is $2,617,782 of a $28,361,470 budget in FY28 — 9% — and $0 of $36,722,314 by FY33. What that does not mean is that the rest cannot be cut: it means nobody has priced it here, and the district would be into classroom teachers by then.
When the model says the list is empty, that is this tool running out of things it has priced, not Lunenburg running out of things it can cut. A real district keeps going, and what it goes into is classroom teachers — exactly as it did in FY27. So the honest way to read the unclosed years is in teachers, at $102,510 each, against 1581 students:
Which is the real ending, and it is worse than a wall: there is no year where cutting becomes impossible, only years where it stops being survivable. By FY37 the district would be 25.2 positions down from the cut list and another 45 classroom teachers beyond it.
It is an annual figure
Not a running total. In FY37 alone, running FY27’s services would cost $45,476,584 against $36,203,621 of revenue. The next year it starts again, larger.
It is in future dollars
$9.27M of FY37 money, ten fiscal years out. In today’s purchasing power that is roughly $7,244,024 — still enormous, but not as enormous as it looks.
Nobody will ever see it
Massachusetts budgets must balance, so this shortfall never appears on a statement. It is not a prediction of a deficit — it is the annual price, in FY37, of still having what the district has today.
What you would actually see in FY37 is that figure paid in two currencies instead of one: about $3,556,962 of programs and 25.2 staff positions already gone, so the district is no longer buying them — plus roughly $4.57M still unfunded in that year, with nothing left on the list to cut. The two do not add exactly to $9.27M, because a cut made early also stops inflating; cutting sooner is worth more than cutting later.
A gap that grows needs a remedy that grows. Anything that arrives once gets overtaken — the only question is how long that takes.
0 year
what one $613,238 override buys
An override permanently raises the levy limit, and that lift then grows 2½% a year — slower than the gap. So one ballot question is not a fix, it is a postponement, and the next one has to be bigger.
13+ years
at $150M of new value a year, sustained
It genuinely works — at a scale that would remake the town. $150M a year is 97% of Lunenburg’s entire existing commercial base, added every year. After a decade the commercial base would be 10.7× what it is now.
$3.57M
off the FY37 gap, from health insurance alone
The one remedy that is neither a tax nor a cut: change the growth rates themselves. Health insurance is 15% of the budget growing at 9%. Holding it to 4% takes the FY37 gap from $9.27M to $5.71M — it does not close it, but it nearly halves it, and it makes everything else smaller.
Put together: holding health to 4%, building at $106.90M a year, and passing $613,238 of override covers the whole fifteen years. Any one of them alone does not. That is the honest shape of the problem — not a single decision anybody can take at a Town Meeting, but three sustained ones. Cutting is not a fourth option so much as what happens while none of them is chosen: it holds the line for about 6 years, at 25.2 staff positions and $3,556,962 of programs, and then there is nothing left to cut and the arithmetic resumes.