~10 min read
The town owes about $107 million. Voters approved every dollar of it at the ballot, project by project. The town has had 51 of those ballot questions since 1988, and voters have said yes to 50 of them.
Big things the town builds, schools, fire trucks, seawalls, libraries, get paid for by borrowing. The town can't borrow without asking voters. That question on the ballot is called a debt exclusion.
Marblehead has had 51 of them on the ballot since 1988. Voters approved 50. Most were for school buildings (21 of the 51). The rest paid for storm drains, the transfer station, fire trucks, seawalls, Fort Sewall, Council on Aging, the Abbot Library renovation, and similar town capital projects. The lone rejection was a 2002 question on repairs to Tucker's Wharf; it has not been put back on the ballot since.
| What kind of project | Examples | Votes |
|---|---|---|
| Schools | The high school (build and convert), Village School, Glover, the new Elbridge Gerry School, the high school roof and HVAC, plus many smaller repair and computer-equipment rounds | 21 |
| Public works | Storm drains, the transfer station, Ocean Avenue causeway, seawalls and fences, salt shed, Green Street remediation, sewers | 12 |
| General town buildings | Fort Sewall, Old Town House and Abbot Hall tower, Lead Mills land, Mary Alley HVAC, Robinson Farm parcels | 7 |
| Public safety | Four fire pumper trucks, the quint fire truck, equipment for police and inspectors | 6 |
| Library and recreation | The Abbot Public Library renovation (2023), an earlier library remodel, and the lone losing vote, the 2002 Tucker's Wharf repair | 3 |
| Council on Aging | Construction of the Council on Aging building | 1 |
| FY24 capital bundle | Roof replacements, road and sidewalk work, smart panels, HVAC, salt shed, and the high-school boiler, packaged together as one ballot question | 1 |
| Total | 51 | |
Source: MA DOR debt-exclusion file, filtered to Marblehead. These are individual ballot questions; the override history chart shows operating overrides alongside this debt-exclusion record.
A debt exclusion is written into Proposition 2½, the 1980 state law that caps property tax growth. It works in four steps:
The practical effect: in fiscal year 2023, the town's audited books showed $11.00 million of debt service, and $11.00 million of it was on the "excluded" side. In other words, every dollar of the annual debt payment came from the voter-approved exclusion surcharge, not from the regular operating-budget levy.
The annual debt payment has bounced between $5 million and $13 million over the last twelve years. Audited figures run through FY25 (newly available from the FY25 ACFR); FY26 and FY27 are budgeted.
Solid line: actual debt payments from each year's audited annual report (DLS Schedule A). Dashed line: budgeted payments from the FY2027 Proposed Budget for FY25, FY26, and FY27. The FY25 ACFR (published June 2026) reports general-fund debt service of $11.26 million, close to the FY25 budgeted value shown here; the DLS Schedule A filing for FY25 typically posts later in 2026.
FY22's $12.7 million counts a refinancing of older bonds at lower rates, which the audit records as a one-time payment even though residents did not actually pay more that year. Otherwise, payments grew gradually through FY21 (when the new Gerry School bonds came on), stepped up again with the FY24 capital bundle, and are budgeted to hold in the $9–11 million band through FY27.
From the April 7, 2025 Finance Committee meeting:
"When you issue debt, maybe you issue it for a 15-year or 20-year. Eventually that annual payment will roll off. When that happens, the roll off would result in a reduced tax bill. The balancing act is when things roll off, do we need other things to roll on because of need?"
The same meeting noted that the Select Board has adopted a policy of keeping total debt payments below 15% of general fund revenue. Marblehead has run around 9–10% recently, well under the policy.
The $107.4 million the town owes at the end of FY25 is mostly general-obligation bonds it sold to fund voter-approved projects. (A smaller share, about $6.5 million combined, is what the Water and Municipal Light departments owe on past projects of their own. Those get paid from water and electric rates, not from property taxes.)
The audited report lays out exactly how much is due each year until the current bonds are paid off, in FY2044. The annual payment steps down evenly from here:
That assumes voters do not approve more borrowing between now and then. When they do (and they have approved $23.8 million more borrowing that the town has not yet issued bonds for – the biggest pieces are High School roof and HVAC at $8.6 million, Roads and sidewalks at $7.0 million, and Mary Alley building HVAC at $5.8 million), the new payments get added on top of this schedule.
| Fiscal year | Principal | Interest | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY26 | $5,955,000 | $3,162,146 | $9,117,146 |
| FY27 | $6,225,000 | $2,889,104 | $9,114,104 |
| FY28 | $6,500,000 | $2,607,573 | $9,107,573 |
| FY29 | $6,720,000 | $2,316,691 | $9,036,691 |
| FY30 | $7,020,000 | $2,021,698 | $9,041,698 |
| FY31–FY35 (5-year avg) | $6,570,000 | $1,261,800 | $7,831,800 |
| FY36–FY40 (5-year avg) | $4,600,000 | $416,242 | $5,016,242 |
| FY41–FY44 (4-year avg) | $1,313,750 | $40,563 | $1,354,313 |
| Total of all 19 years | $93,525,000 | $21,549,675 | $115,074,675 |
Governmental general-obligation bonds only. The audited report shows FY31–FY44 as three multi-year blocks; those blocks are shown here as per-year averages so the numbers are comparable to the FY26–FY30 rows. Source: FY25 ACFR, page 59.
The dollar amount Marblehead owed went up by 45% over the last decade, from $74 million (FY15) to $107 million (FY25). But total personal income in town grew by 83% and total assessed home values grew by 65%. So even as the debt grew, it shrank as a share of the local economy.
The two ratios bond rating agencies watch most closely:
Standard & Poor's, the agency that rates municipal bonds, has held Marblehead at AAA (the highest possible) for 16 consecutive years. In April 2026 S&P reaffirmed AAA but moved the outlook from stable to negative, citing the FY27 operating budget gap.
State law also caps how much a town can borrow at 5% of its equalized property value. For Marblehead at the end of FY25 that ceiling was about $475 million. The town was using about 14% of it. A decade earlier the town was at 23% of the ceiling, so the headroom has roughly doubled.
| Fiscal year | Debt owed | As % of resident income | As % of home values |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY15 | $74.1M | 6.34% | 1.39% |
| FY18 | $73.9M | 5.80% | 1.23% |
| FY21 | $118.8M | 8.38% | 1.57% |
| FY22 | $119.9M | 6.97% | 1.53% |
| FY23 | $124.9M | 6.49% | 1.48% |
| FY24 | $116.5M | 6.02% | 1.19% |
| FY25 | $107.4M | 5.02% | 1.07% |
"Resident income" is the U.S. Census personal income total for Marblehead. "Home values" is total assessed value of all property in town. Source: FY25 ACFR, pages 123 and 124.
The town's bonds currently carry interest rates between 2% and 5%. Most were issued between 2015 and 2021, when interest rates were at historic lows, so the locked-in cost of carrying that debt is favorable by today's standards. The town has also done several rounds of refunding (the municipal version of refinancing a mortgage) to swap older higher-cost bonds for newer lower-cost ones.
The FY25 ACFR's government-wide Statement of Net Position shows the town's net position improved from −$37.8 million (FY24) to −$10.3 million (FY25), a $27.5 million one-year change that the MD&A flags as the headline financial result. Almost none of it is real money. The General Fund's net change in fund balance for the same year was −$107,509, after the town used $6.5 million of unassigned fund balance as planned.
"Net position" is a GASB accrual concept that adds together capital assets, deferred outflows, liabilities (including the full present value of pension and OPEB obligations), and deferred inflows of resources. When the actuary updates the long-run assumptions on the OPEB plan, the whole liability moves. The FY25 actuarial update did three things at once:
The net of those moves dropped the Town's Net OPEB Liability from $147.1M to $142.0M and shifted several OPEB-related deferred inflow / outflow lines. Combined with routine debt principal paydown of $7.8M, depreciation timing, and a handful of smaller items, the recognition swing was enough to add $27.5M to net position in a single year while actual operations were essentially flat.
If next year's actuarial review reverses any of the FY25 assumption changes, net position can swing the other way by a similar magnitude. The number is real for GAAP purposes and the audit signs off on it; the spendable cash flow it implies is roughly zero. The cleanest one-year measure of the town's operational result is the General Fund's net change in fund balance, which in FY25 was −$107,509 — essentially breakeven.
Of the seventeen peer towns the site uses elsewhere, Marblehead's debt payments were the second-largest share of total town spending in FY24, at 10.95%. The Gerry School bonds were issued recently and the FY24 capital bundle is new, so the town is paying off newer debt than most of its peers.
FY2024 debt payments as a percentage of total town spending. Source: each town's state Schedule A filing. Peer median: 9.5%. FY24 is the latest year all towns have reported.
A higher share is not "worse-managed." Towns that just finished a school project pay more on debt than towns that have not built one in fifteen years. Recency, not management.
The June 2026 override raised the operating budget. It was a different decision from debt:
The payoff schedule from FY2030 onward depends on whether voters approve more borrowing between now and then. Each new project is its own ballot question.
The outstanding debt total, the maturity schedule, the authorized-but-unissued list, the legal debt limit, and the credit rating all come from the FY25 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (the audited annual report, abbreviated ACFR) for the Town of Marblehead, audited by Roselli, Clark & Associates and dated June 11, 2026. Specific pages used: Management's Discussion and Analysis (pages 23 to 24), Long-Term Debt note F (pages 58 to 62), Ratios of Outstanding Debt by Type (page 123), Ratios of General Bonded Debt Outstanding (page 124), and Computation of Legal Debt Margin (page 125). The prior year's FY24 ACFR remains the source for the historical comparison; a local copy of the FY24 ACFR is in data/town_docs/FY24_Town_of_Marblehead_ACFR.pdf.
The 51-vote debt-exclusion ballot history is from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services debt-exclusion file, filtered to municipality == "Marblehead". The file shows 50 wins and 1 loss for Marblehead between 1988 and 2025; the single loss was a June 2002 vote on bonds for Tucker's Wharf. The file is in data/dor_debt_exclusion_all.csv.
The recent-years debt-service table (FY24 actual through FY27 proposed) comes from the FY2027 Proposed Budget "Total Debt Service" line. The April 7, 2025 Finance Committee meeting quote and the reference to the Select Board's 15%-of-revenue policy come from the official Vimeo recording of that meeting at the timestamps noted in the page citations.
The peer comparison uses Schedule A filings for the seventeen-town peer set used elsewhere on the site (Marblehead's North Shore peers plus the larger Route 9 / Route 128 towns). Schedule A reports a "Debt Service" total and a total expenditures number for each town and fiscal year; the chart divides the first by the second. The data file is data/peer_schedule_a_expenditures.csv. FY2024 is the most recent year with complete Schedule A data for the full peer set as of June 2026.
A structured digest of the debt figures used on this page is in data/debt_summary.json for anyone who wants to reuse the numbers programmatically.
This page was originally built against the FY24 ACFR (June 2026) and refreshed to the FY25 ACFR when it published on June 11, 2026. The peer comparison section still uses FY24 Schedule A because the FY25 Schedule A filings for the other peer towns will not all be available until later in 2026; the Marblehead row will be refreshed when the state's FY25 file posts.