Technical Appendix

Beyond the operating gap — shared infrastructure and long-term obligations

The lever menu, and the gap it acts against, concern the Town’s operating budget. Two further obligations sit outside that frame but bear directly on Great Barrington’s fiscal capacity — and, like the school, both are partly regional: Great Barrington carries the majority of a cost whose benefit reaches all three towns.

The water system — a second regional asset Great Barrington carries

Housatonic Water Works, the troubled private system serving the Housatonic village, is a fiscal exposure the Town has been managing for years. The system runs on roughly 840–850 connections over about 17 miles of mains, some 80% of them dating to the 1800s; engineering reviews put the cost of bringing it to standard at roughly $22 million in 2018, rising to about $31 million by 2021 — a capital need many times what so small a ratepayer base can absorb. The company’s water has carried manganese and disinfection-byproduct (HAA5) problems under a MassDEP consent order, and the rate case that followed (DPU Docket No. 23-65) opened with a petition for a 112% increase and settled at about 65% — even after which the state earmarked $300,000 specifically to help Great Barrington customers buy water or filtration. It is also, like the high school, a regional asset: Great Barrington holds the large majority of the customers — on the order of 75–80%, the same share it carries of the school — but the system also serves a defined area in Stockbridge (six streets) and customers in West Stockbridge. Whatever resolution the Town reaches — acquisition, rehabilitation, or a negotiated transfer — the cost falls first and largest on Great Barrington while the benefit reaches residents of all three towns. That is the same structure as the school, and it points to the same conclusion: giving Great Barrington the fiscal headroom to address shared infrastructure is in every member town’s interest, precisely because Great Barrington is the town carrying the shared burden. The regional apportionment correction is what creates that headroom. (Figures from the 2018 and 2021 engineering reviews and the DPU rate record, Docket No. 23-65, in which the Town of Stockbridge was a named intervenor.)

Unfunded retiree benefits (OPEB) — at the Town and the District

Beyond the annual budget, Great Barrington carries a large unfunded liability for other post-employment benefits (OPEB) — chiefly retiree health insurance. At the Town level the net unfunded liability is about $13M (down from $20.6M in 2020 as the Town has begun funding a trust — though the trust balance remains under $1.5M, so at current contribution rates full funding is decades away). On top of that sits Great Barrington’s share of the District’s unfunded OPEB: BHRSD’s net OPEB liability is roughly $65M, of which Great Barrington bears $34M–$49M depending on whether the obligation is attributed on the capital share (52.8%) or the operating share (74–75%) — the same apportionment question that drives the school assessment, here applied to a liability several times the size of a single year’s assessment. Combined, Great Barrington’s total OPEB exposure is on the order of $47M–$62M — roughly a full year of the Town’s total appropriations. (Pensions, by contrast, are not a concern: the Town’s share of the Berkshire County Retirement System is about 91% funded.) None of this appears in the operating gap the levers act against; it is a parallel, slower-moving claim on the Town’s capacity — and, in the District’s portion, one more regional cost that Great Barrington pays the majority of. (The District reports OPEB in total; the Great Barrington share is a Parcenomics attribution by apportionment method, not a figure carried separately in the audited statements — hence the range.)

A note on source records

The figures in this report are drawn from authoritative electronic sources — principally the Town’s Department of Revenue / Division of Local Services state filings (Tax Rate Recap, LA-4, LA-7, LA-13, and the equalized-valuation series), together with other public data.

The Town also provided about 1,000 pages of FY2026 commitment records — real estate tax, personal property tax, motor-vehicle excise, and water and sewer billing — in paper form only; a request for digital copies was declined as “Town Policy.” (The Massachusetts Public Records Law, as amended in 2016, directs a records access officer to provide records in a searchable, machine-readable format to the extent feasible — M.G.L. c.66 §6A(d) — and commitment rolls of this kind are generated in electronic assessing and collection systems.)

That format has one concrete consequence worth stating plainly. Because the water and sewer bills arrived only on paper, they could not be incorporated into the household figures in this report. The median-home numbers here are therefore the complete all-in property-tax bill — but not the full municipal bill, which for a resident also includes water and sewer. A household’s true all-in municipal cost is somewhat higher than shown. The cost of paper-only records is not mainly researcher time; it is that the taxpayer cannot be shown a complete all-in picture.

(M.G.L. c.66 §6A, malegislature.gov; Secretary of the Commonwealth, “A Guide to the Massachusetts Public Records Law.”)