Town checkbook

Notes

What "the budget" means

$206.1M is every appropriation in every fund – including capital articles, the OPEB trust, the Larz Anderson trust, the Light Department pass-through, and 300+ small revolving and grant funds. $127.3M is the annual operating envelope (Town general fund $60.6M + School general fund $49.1M + Water $6.5M + Sewer $5.5M + Tax Articles $4.3M + Harbor $1.3M). The Light Department runs as a self-supporting enterprise outside the appropriation process. The Budget vs Actual chart above filters down to that $127.3M envelope.

Budget vs spent vs vendor payments

The budget portal also publishes an FY26 actual rollup of $140.4M through May 29, which includes payroll and inter-fund transfers. The $99.9M on this page is just vendor checks (the accounts-payable side). The gap between the two is mostly payroll.

Why some bars look over budget

The Light Department ($13.2M) is self-supporting and has no appropriation, so it shows up against a $0 budget. Snow Removal ($687K vs $105K) is intentionally under-budgeted and topped up at year-end. Neither is a runaway expense.

Why the state is the top vendor

$17.5M of FY26 checks went to "Commonwealth of MA," more than to any other payee. Most of it is health insurance: $12.8M booked under Group Insurance, the premiums the town pays the state's GIC for employee and retiree coverage. The rest is state assessments and charges spread across town and enterprise funds. A sliver moves through agency funds such as "Due to Commonwealth - Firearms": firearms license fees the town collects and passes through to the state ($19,425 this year). "Due to" funds are pass-throughs the town holds briefly on the state's behalf, never the town's money to spend.

Vendor names are ledger labels

Names come straight from the town's accounts-payable ledger. "ONE TIME PAY" ($1.2M across 14 funds) is the ledger's bucket for one-off payees, not a company. "Marblehead Light Dept" appearing as a vendor is town and school departments paying the municipal Light Department for electricity. Where the ledger splits one payee across spelling variants ("National Grid" and "National Grid Company") or garbles a name at the export's 50-character limit, we merge and repair the display using a curated alias list; hover any row to see the ledger's original string.

What we redacted

The town's source export tags specific employees by surname for medical claims under the 111F Injury Leave Fund (e.g., "BURT INJURY" paid to Spaulding Rehab) and lists student initials for out-of-district SpEd placements. We dropped the Description column entirely and pulled 560 rows ($413K) from the 111F and Workers Comp funds. The aggregate is still in the budget chart above.

Source files

checkbook_FY26_2026-06-09.csv · budget_actual_FY26.json · checkbook_performance.json · checkbook_redaction_disclosure.json · checkbook_labels.json