Town Manager Carrie LaFleur told the Concord Finance Committee on Tuesday that the town's budget is set annually by town meeting and that detailed account codes cited by a concerned resident are internal tracking, not separate voter-approved appropriations. "Under our budget process, line item appropriations approved by town meeting serve as budget cost centers," LaFleur said, adding that ledger-level codes appear in the general ledger but are not part of the warrant-approved appropriations.

The exchange followed correspondence from homeowner and data specialist Miguel Echevarri, who told the committee he had asked for multi-year budget spreadsheets and loaded available data into his database. "As I started looking at the data, I started becoming a little bit more concerned that what's the integrity of it?" Echevarri said, asking whether something might have gone wrong during a data conversion and requesting access to the complete underlying data.

LaFleur acknowledged the volume of questions and described why some details appear only in the general ledger rather than the budget book. She said staffing and outdated systems have created manual work and that the town is migrating payroll and HR functions into a Munis enterprise resource planning system and adopting ClearGov to publish a GFOA-compliant budget book that will make detailed budget information more accessible. "This alignment between the warrant, budget book, and expense tracking enables public transparency while maintaining a clear structure," LaFleur said.

LaFleur also explained a commonly observed pattern in municipal budgeting: vacancies in full-time salary lines can create underspending in those lines while overtime or other pay categories run higher. She urged the committee to consider combined personnel spending when assessing budget performance and said the town will review the correspondence and route issues that fall outside the committee's purview to the appropriate boards and departments.

The committee chair thanked both LaFleur and Echevarri and asked Colin Reed to lead a staff review to determine which detailed questions the finance committee should pursue and which should be forwarded elsewhere. The town did not provide new spreadsheets during the meeting; officials said they will follow up on the specific data requests after staff review.

The committee recorded that action and moved on to the evening's other items.