Everyone who does this work
has had to win the vote.

A correct number that nobody votes for has accomplished nothing at all. People resist change, and they resist it hardest around schools and around the departments they love — fire and ambulance are not line items to anybody, they are the neighbors who show up at two in the morning.

So knowing how a proposal survives a Town Meeting — who to bring in early, what to give up before you are asked, which objection is really about something else entirely — is worth as much as the model. On the emotional departments it is worth more. It is not a thing you can read your way into, and it is the reason the bar here is what it is.

Nobody delivers a Parcenomics engagement who has not stood in front of a Town Meeting and had to win a vote. Not presented to one. Won at one, with something real on the line.

That filter rules out most consultants, and it rules in people who are easy to overlook — a retired town administrator, a former assessor, a planning board chair who has carried a zoning article through a two-thirds vote, which is a steeper hill than any budget. What they have in common is that they have been on the receiving end of the question you are about to be asked.

Great Barrington and Stockbridge were built without a contract, without a data access agreement, and without a single thing anybody had to sign. Every figure came from records the law already makes available — the assessor’s database, the Tax Rate Recapitulation, appropriation histories, the voter file — requested the way any resident can request them.

I have since been invited to present to the Great Barrington Finance Committee. An invitation is not a contract, and neither town is a client.

Which is worth more to you than a reference would be. The thing that stalls a first conversation is almost always the same worry: that this begins with handing an outsider the keys to the town’s data. It does not. The entire baseline can be assembled before a town spends a dollar or grants anyone access to anything — and both models reproduce their town’s certified figures to the dollar, which you are welcome to check against the filings before you take a meeting.

I was the consulting CFO of a regional ambulance service in a severe funding crisis, apportioned across its member towns. I built the budget strategy and then presented it myself at all six Town Meetings. Every one of them approved it. That work put $1.5 million of new revenue into the service across FY2027 through FY2030, and the fundraising operation I built alongside it raised over $750,000 in a single year — up from $200,000 the year before.

Before that, five years on a Select Board, including as its Chair, working with the Town Administrator on the budget every one of those years. That board regionalized building inspection across five towns, and brought forward a shared-services agreement with West Stockbridge covering fire and EMS. Seven more Town Meetings between them, all seven passed, though on those I made the case at my own and the other boards carried theirs.

I have also written zoning and general bylaws that passed at Town Meeting, which is the same job as a budget article and a steeper vote — two-thirds rather than a majority. And I have written, or been responsible for reviewing, millions of dollars in successful municipal grant applications: three MVP grants, EEA grants, highway grants. That last one is not a credential, it is a warning — I know how much of a grant application is the part nobody wants to do, which is why the offer on the regional page is that I will help write it rather than that I will point at it.

I also served on an eight-town regional planning board that studied a school district merger. I volunteered to join it in my first year on the board — a long assignment, a great many meetings, and no glory in any of it. I have never minded that part of the job. The towns took it up and four of the eight declined it, which is the process working as intended. It is the most instructive thing I have done: I sat through the whole of it and learned which parts of a proposal are arithmetic and which parts were never going to be.

The rest is why there is a working dashboard here instead of a slide about one: I founded and ran venture-backed software companies in Boston before any of this, and I have been the CFO of a school since 2019. Different rooms, same job — making sure the organization behind the person doing the actual work can afford to keep them there.