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A Winchester Select Board discussion of the town’s fiscal 2027 budget gap turned tense, as members openly disagreed over how the three bodies responsible for the town’s finances should be working together with Town Meeting weeks away.
The April 6 meeting laid bare a budget hole of about $5.1 million, driven by the failure of a tax override earlier this year. But the sharper story was process: a running disagreement over how decisions are being made and whether the Select Board has the information it needs to evaluate what is being put in front of it.
Member Paras Bhayani walked the board through a summary he had prepared after a sub-quorum meeting that morning with the town manager, the superintendent, the School Committee chair and vice chair and the Finance Committee chair.
He said the working deficit stood at about $5.1 million, but would be closer to about $6.8 million without certain assumed cuts and revenue adjustments already baked into the analysis.
To get to the $5.1 million figure, the town is leaning on roughly $750,000 in municipal and unallocated reductions, about $950,000 in school cuts or circuit breaker use, another $300,000 in additional circuit breaker use and about $200,000 from reserve-related accounts.
New revenue assumptions — interest income, building permit fees and about $150,000 in transfer station revenue — account for roughly another $1 million. The single largest piece of the plan is a draw of about $3.6 million in free cash, the town’s certified surplus from the prior year and a one-time funding source.
Member Michelle Prior pressed for clearer documentation of where the cuts were coming from and said she wanted to see a Finance Committee narrative laying out exactly what had been reduced from the town manager’s February budget.
“I would expect FinCom to write a budget book that describes what municipal undistributed cuts have been made to the manager’s budget,” Prior said. “I would like to understand that as soon as you know that.
Prior also pushed Bhayani for more detail on what revenue ideas the School Committee was pursuing. Bhayani said athletics and student transportation fees were the only two that had come up at the morning meeting, but cautioned the one-hour session had covered a large amount of material and other ideas were not necessarily off the table.
The sharpest exchange came when member Michael Bettencourt, who had stepped out of the room briefly, said upon returning that he wanted more direct engagement.
“I’d rather hear specifically from management and from the schools and FinCom, you know, not just sub quorum of us, because I think there’s all these questions that we all have,” Bettencourt said.
Bhayani, who had been the board’s strongest advocate for a formal joint meeting of the Select Board, School Committee and Finance Committee, said he had been pushing for exactly the kind of engagement Bettencourt was describing and had encountered resistance.
The morning’s sub-quorum meeting, he said, was an attempt to get facts on the table quickly because a larger meeting could not be assembled in time, and he had shared his summary with Finance Committee Chair Derek Ross before presenting it.
“I’ve been watching the budget process now for three years,” Bhayani said. “These boards do not get together. They do in peer communities.”
Bettencourt offered a different read, saying the boards had long worked together informally even if the meetings were not labeled tri-board sessions.
“While we haven’t called it a tri-board format before, it’s what we’ve always done,” Bettencourt said. “Now we’re in a situation where I think it’s more urgent.”
Chair Anthea Brady moved to defuse the exchange.
“We’re not going to re-litigate it unless we’re watching it in real time,” Brady said.
Bhayani then pressed for a much more aggressive joint meeting schedule, suggesting the three boards meet every two to three days until Town Meeting.
“We had a failed override,” Bhayani said. “We owe it to the community to come together as much as needed.”
Town Manager Chris Senior noted that pulling everyone together on short notice was difficult, saying it was hard to assemble two committees and 10 people on 48 hours’ notice.
Brady said she would work to schedule a joint meeting and reach out to the School Committee for more information on the school side of the budget.
Prior pushed for a more durable arrangement — monthly meetings throughout the year with the Finance Committee included regularly, not just convened in a crisis.
No votes were taken. Brady said the budget would return at a future meeting.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He runs The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
