By Caleb Tobin
EASTON, MA – The town is facing a preliminary FY26 budget deficit of over $6 million, prompting the town to consider cutting services.
In a presentation to the Easton Select Board on Jan. 27, Town Administrator Connor Read outlined the town’s efforts to balance the budget and explain what is driving the large deficit.
“The coming fiscal year is going to be extremely difficult for this community,” said Read. “High inflation, ballooning insurance costs, minimal state aid, and expiring federal grants are all coming to a head at the same time in FY26.”
The expiration of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, which helped municipalities offset low revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, is partially contributing to increased expenses.
“In Easton, we did use those [funds] and we planned for their expiration,” said Read. “On the expense side, we knew we would either need to fund or cut approximately $1 million in programmatic services funded by both ESSER and ARPA by either moving them into operating budgets for the town or school or eliminating them if we couldn’t.”
A rise in fixed costs of $3.6 million over two years has hampered the town’s ability to maintain those services, significantly reducing the money available to fund increases in town and school department budgets.
Between FY24 and FY26, the town’s healthcare premiums increased by $2 million, pension assessments went up by $900,000, insurance costs went up, and regional school assessments increased by $500,000.
Other issues include one third of Easton’s land being preserved or undeveloped, meaning the land produces little to no tax revenue, and a reduction in operating costs being covered by state aid.
In FY10, state aid covered 31% of the school department’s budget. In FY25, it covered just 22%.
Many towns in Massachusetts have faced fiscal challenges in recent years as revenues failed to keep pace with expenses. Some towns have passed overrides to raise additional revenue, which Easton last did in 2006. Other communities have resorted to cutting services to balance the budget.
In his presentation, Read outlined what Easton has done in recent years to address this problem.
“We have, in seven years, grown our stabilization fund, which is functionally the town’s savings account, by 400% from $1.7 million to $7 million. We’ve adopted conservative budgets for the town and school department that from FY19-24, before these fixed costs started really exploding, had an annualized average increase of about 2.75%,” he said.
The town also reduced budgets in FY25, which included reduced police staffing, cuts to public safety training, and 10% across-the-board cuts to town and school expense budgets. The town has also deferred capital programs, consolidated departments, and has frozen budgeted vacancies in numerous departments until further notice.
“We have extremely lean town and school operating budgets that spend far below most peers on a per-resident or per-student basis. These are not shown here as a point of pride,” Read said, referring to a chart in the presentation. “It is not a good thing that Easton’s general government spends less than half the amount per resident than our comparable communities.”
Read said the deficit is too large for the town to innovate or reorganize its way out of it, and that both town and school budgets must be cut to balance the budget.
“Any meaningful reduction to this budget request from the town and school department will translate to reductions in personnel and cuts to public and education services,” Read said.
Craig Barger, vice chair of the Select Board, said he has been concerned about these budget challenges for the past few years.
“I particularly think it’s important that Connor indicated about one-time revenue, that you can’t spend all that revenue this year cause when next year comes, you’ll be in a bigger problem,” Barger said.
Barger encouraged citizens to watch or attend PASE meetings and ask questions.
Select Board member Jennifer Stacey, attending the meeting remotely, said she was not surprised at the budgetary challenges facing the town but was still shocked.
‘We’ve known these factors were going to come to a head at some point, but I think the shocking part is how they came together in unison and how much of an impact it had,” she said. “It is going to be very painful.”
The full budget presentation can be viewed here.
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