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Budget season begins: departments to assemble requests, formal review to start in January
Summary
Committee members reviewed the town's budget process timeline: departments gather requests now, internal review in October-November, presentations to the Board of Selectmen in January, and final actions through March. The committee discussed standardizing account coding to reduce cross-department inconsistencies.
Town staff and audit committee members outlined the fiscal 2026 budget process on Sept. 24, describing the schedule and steps officials will use to assemble and review departmental requests. Finance staff described department-level work beginning now, with formal departmental budget meetings beginning in October and November and a series of line-by-line reviews continuing into December. The town typically presents a preliminary budget to the Board of Selectmen in January with subsequent Board of Finance review and final adoption in March. Staff said one near-term improvement is to standardize object-code usage across departments to reduce bookkeeping differences that make year-to-year comparisons difficult. "One of the things we're gonna work on this year is to standardize what goes in different object codes, different expenditure accounts," a finance official said. The committee also discussed public access: staff will post meeting schedules, agendas and recordings so residents can follow budget deliberations. No formal decisions were recorded; members requested inclusion of the town's cash and investment balance detail in future packets.
