~10 min read
The town owes about $116 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 voting record page groups multiple debt-exclusion questions on the same trip to the polls into one "attempt" and tallies 28 of 29 since 1982. Same vote history, counted differently.
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 FY24; FY25, 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.
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 $116.5 million the town owes at the end of FY24 is mostly general-obligation bonds it sold to fund voter-approved projects. (A smaller share, about $7 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 is highest right now and gradually steps down through the 2030s and 2040s:
That assumes voters do not approve more borrowing between now and then. When they do (and they have approved $12 million more borrowing that the town has not yet issued bonds for, the biggest piece being road and sidewalk work), the new payments get added on top of this schedule.
| Fiscal year | Principal | Interest | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY25 | $7,540,000 | $3,453,080 | $10,993,080 |
| 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–FY34 (5-year avg) | $6,801,000 | $1,500,316 | $8,301,316 |
| FY35–FY39 (5-year avg) | $4,962,000 | $543,312 | $5,505,312 |
| FY40–FY44 (5-year avg) | $1,862,000 | $71,205 | $1,933,205 |
| Total of all 20 years | $101,065,000 | $25,002,755 | $126,067,755 |
Governmental general-obligation bonds only. The audited report shows FY30–FY44 as three five-year blocks; those blocks are shown here as per-year averages so the numbers are comparable to the FY25–FY29 rows. Source: FY24 ACFR, page 61.
The dollar amount Marblehead owed went up by 57% over the last decade, from $74 million to $116 million. But total personal income in town grew by 66% and total assessed home values grew by 72%. 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) since at least 2015. 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 FY24 that ceiling was about $475 million. The town was using about 12% of it. A decade earlier the town was at 31% of the ceiling, so the headroom has more than 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% |
"Resident income" is the U.S. Census personal income total for Marblehead. "Home values" is total assessed value of all property in town. Source: FY24 ACFR, pages 121 and 122.
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.
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 is about the day-to-day operating budget. It is 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 FY24 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (the audited annual report, abbreviated ACFR) for the Town of Marblehead, audited by Roselli, Clark & Associates and dated March 2025. Specific pages used: Management Discussion and Analysis (pages 25 to 26), Long-Term Debt note (pages 58 to 62), Changes in Long-Term Liabilities (page 59), Ratios of Outstanding Debt by Type (page 121), Ratios of General Bonded Debt Outstanding (page 122), and Computation of Legal Debt Margin (page 123). A local copy of the 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 built in June 2026 and will be rechecked when the FY25 ACFR is published, expected early 2027.