Town leaders laid out a grim financial picture on Tuesday as they took the next step toward asking voters to approve a tax override next May.

In a presentation to the Select Board, town staff projected that simply maintaining the existing level of town and school services in fiscal year 2027, which starts on July 1, 2026, would cost $16 million more than the town is projected to bring in through revenue.

That number is likely to change as town budget staff refine their forecasts in the coming months.

Still, it indicates that if voters don’t approve a tax override in May, deep cuts will hit Brookline’s municipal departments and school district over the next several years. Even if voters agree to raise their taxes to send millions more into the town’s coffers, smaller, but still substantial, cuts could be necessary.

At Tuesday’s Select Board meeting, Town Administrator Charles Carey put forward an early draft proposal for a new operating override that would bring in $5.3 million to support town departments, such as police, fire and public works, over the next three years. The school department has not yet presented a similar draft.

“We’re digging deep into the details of the school budget and the town budget and what options we have to improve our financial situation over the short term and the long term, but it’s a very difficult situation,” Select Board Chair Bernard Greene said in an interview.

He pointed both to the structural challenges created by Proposition 2 1/2, which limits how much municipalities can raise their property tax levy each year, and to “externalities” that increase expenses.

“When we move forward a little bit, we are pushed back double the distance,” he said.

The town’s budget staff say that the rising expenses are primarily caused by salary increases and soaring benefit costs, particularly health insurance premiums, which are set to rise by 12% each of the next few years.

“Most of our money is in people,” said Deputy Town Administrator Melissa Goff. Special education costs in Brookline schools have also soared in recent years.

Municipalities across the state are facing similar issues, in what the Massachusetts Municipal Association recently called a “tightening vise” of financial pressures.

Uncertainty around school budget

The bulk of the $16-million gap is on the school district’s side of the ledger. The latest projections from school officials, made public in November, lay out a nearly $13-million rise in expenses from this fiscal year to next, a 9% increase.

At a School Committee meeting on Dec. 4, Superintendent Bella Wong said the district will present updated budget projections on or before the committee’s next meeting on Dec. 18.

“We have been looking closely at our accounts and have been considering possibilities for reductions, reorganization, restoration and growth,” she said on Dec. 4. “We have also looked at potential sources of revenue.”

“Some of what we have been looking at will necessarily impact current staff, which is always a difficult matter,” Wong added.

Wong said the district is working on an “accelerated timeline” to provide budget projections. Typically, budget talks ramp up in February, but the district is aiming to share information sooner this cycle due to the potential override, she said.

The district’s expenses are increasing in a more sustainable way than in previous budget cycles, Susan Givens, the school department’s deputy superintendent of administration and finance, said in November.

“We had a problem that has to be attended to, and I feel good that the work that we’ve done … I don’t think that when the gap is filled, you’re going to have another gap, and another gap, and another gap,” she said.

**Override ask takes shape **

Like every other municipality in Massachusetts, Brookline is governed by a state law called Proposition 2 1/2, which limits it to raising its overall property tax levy — the biggest source of revenue for the town — by 2.5% each year, plus a fraction for “new growth.”

For many years, rising costs in the town have outpaced those increases, leading the town’s leaders to ask voters for an override, in which voters agree to permanently raise their property taxes by more than the 2.5% cap.

Voters approved the most recent override in 2023 by a large margin. That override was intended to help cover three years of town spending. However, the $12 million in added revenue from property taxes – a 4.2% increase in tax bills — hasn’t been enough to stave off major cuts to Brookline’s school system in the last three years. These included eliminating the district’s equity office and slashing its world language program for younger students. Other town departments faced smaller cuts.

Recent Brookline overrides have included separate pots of funding for town departments and the school district.

Adjusted for inflation, the $5.3 million Carey’s early draft is roughly the same amount as the $4.9 million that town departments received from the 2023 override. The schools received nearly $7 million from that vote.

“It’s difficult for me to have this conversation with the uncertainty around the schools,” Select Board member Paul Warren said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We’re being asked to reconcile the future finances for the town without understanding what’s going on with the schools. It’s impossible.”

Carey’s $5.3-million draft proposal would help fund the fire department’s recent contract and pay firefighter overtime, restore six positions in the police department which have been unfilled for several years, and keep the newly formed Sustainability Division afloat, among other things.

“We’re not in a place where we’re asking for new things. This is not a luxury override,” Carey said.

If no override is passed, his preliminary plan would involve cutting around 20 positions across a number of town departments. The impact on the schools, while not currently quantified, would likely hit many more positions.

Carey and town staff are also calling for several changes to bring in more revenue to the town, most notably a $10 increase to tickets for several of the most common kinds of parking violations in Brookline. But projected new revenues from those changes only add up to about $354,000 for next year.

In the long term, commercial development could also help even out the town’s budget and ease the burden on taxpayers, but work to redevelop a large site on Route 9 won’t be done nearly in time to change the calculation for the next few years.

**What happens next? **

The town staff presentation on Tuesday will inform the work of a committee called the Expenditures and Revenue Study Committee, which is working on a formal override recommendation.

That recommendation will be sent to the Select Board, which has until March to finalize a ballot question that would then be put to voters in Brookline in May.

Most of the details of that prospective ballot question remain up in the air, including how much it would raise voters’ tax bills and whether voters might have multiple options on the ballot for different levels of override.