Follow the budget.
Spot the spikes.

Formula: (current year − prior year) ÷ prior year × 100. Comparisons require consecutive fiscal years and a consistent category. A zero prior-year amount is labeled “New funding” and has no percentage rank.

Original budgets come from the ORIGINAL BUDGET column in the town’s Finance Committee books. The longer revised-budget and actual-spending series comes from retained year-end reports; voted department budgets come from explicitly VOTED columns. Finance Committee recommendations have their own comparison mode and do not establish final adoption. The published percentage column can use a different baseline, so this tracker recalculates each change.

The General Fund total includes schools, municipal operations, fixed costs, debt service and listed transfers. Enterprise funds are separate. Capital articles and supplemental appropriations outside the source table are excluded. Percentage change measures nominal budget growth; it is not a measure of price inflation.

Public Works and Central Maintenance are combined across FY2025’s reporting split. Council on Aging and Elder and Human Services share a category. Small prior-year bases are labeled because they can produce large percentages. Missing years are not bridged.

FY2026 enterprise original/actual figures are excluded because the 2026 book’s enterprise headings contain conflicting fiscal years. The FY2027 narrative percentage differs from its detailed table; this tracker uses the table amounts. Sources are checked daily, and open pages refresh the saved data every minute. A failed source check retains the last verified figures. Year-end and voted figures continue to update through the existing midnight Eastern town-records job. Restatements and known department cost transfers are shown beside the figures.