The gap is what has to be found before the budget can balance — not what is left unpaid after. A Massachusetts town cannot adopt an unbalanced budget, so this is never a deficit in the corporate sense.

In FY2026 · certified it is the distance between what the Town appropriated and what it raised from recurring revenue — the levy, state aid and local receipts. Great Barrington filed a balanced Recapitulation. The balance came from $3,931,723 of free cash appropriated to reduce the levy (LA-7, line IIId.1a). So the number is not a hole in the filing; it is the size of the one-time money holding the rate down.

In a projected year it is appropriations grown at the rates set under Assumptions, less a levy growing 2½%, state aid and local receipts. No free cash. The Town has committed to ending the practice — “move toward a model where recurring revenues support recurring expenses” — so the projection assumes none. That is their plan, not our pessimism.

What happened to the reserves

	Free cash
Certified 29 January 2026	$11,245,266
After the cannabis settlements	$6,182,038
After the FY2027 plan	$1,295,533
After the override failed, 12 May	$171,951

Of the original balance, $5,063,228 was the Cannabis Community Impact Fund — never operating money — and it went out in five litigation settlements. The remainder funded the FY2027 budget.

$171,951 is free cash, not total reserves. Stabilization is a separate fund. But as discretionary capacity it is a 98% reduction, and the Town’s own adjustments document says it “would fall well below prudent reserve levels.”

FY2027 still carries a $2,000,000 free cash offset to operating, against a historical average of about $3.9M. The stated offset is not the whole of it. Recurring operating cost also sits inside the special articles: the $414,676 Southern Berkshire Ambulance line is the FY2027 operating assessment, not a one-time expense — and it is contractual: a three-year agreement at $414,676 in FY2027, escalating 7.5% in each of FY2028 and FY2029 ($445,777, then $479,210). It was placed on the override-contingent list, and the override failed.

That escalator is the structural problem in one line. The levy may grow 2½%. This contract grows at three times that rate, and the regional school assessment at about 7%. Over the three years the ambulance contract alone costs $1,339,663; the same service held to the levy’s own growth rate would cost $1,275,388. Obligations compounding faster than the cap is what produces a structural gap — free cash only conceals it.

The next certification — the money that will be available for FY2028 — is set by DLS in August–September, out of FY2026 operations. It is not the $171,951: that is what remains of the FY2026 certification after the FY2027 budget. The stock is spent; whether the flow returns depends on whether the estimating practice continues.