Framingham's Budget Process Is Designed to Confuse and Deceive
No strategy, no goals and no priorities frame a budget process which hides both bulging reserves and historic underfunding of the schools.
The Mayor submitted the FY26 city budget to the City Council, accompanied by a press release posted on April 29, 2025.
Mayor Sisitsky Submits Fiscal Year 2026
The news was also carried in the Patch on April 30, 2025:
Framingham Mayor Submits FY26 Budget
and in the MetroWest Daily News on May 5, 2025:
Framingham mayor proposes 7% increase in fiscal '26 budget
This budget and the process which the City Council uses to review it suffer from a number of serious problems:
A majority of City Councilors are cut out of the main budget discussion.
The budget lacks information vital for both City Council review and community engagement.
Key reserve fund information is deliberately withheld, despite a City Charter requirement to include it in the Mayor’s budget submission.
Local funding for the schools has fallen to an 18 year low, and the almost $80 million in skyrocketing reserve funds could easily repair the $2.5 million shortfall in city funding of the school district budget.
1. A Majority of City Councilors Are Cut Out of the Main Budget Discussion
This is the start of the FY26 city budget discussion, where the City Council runs most of the process through its Finance Subcommittee, so that its 5 members get to review the budget, hear all of the department inputs, and ask all the budget questions, while the other 6 members of the City Council sit on the sidelines, unable to ask questions at any of those meetings for Open Meeting Law reasons.
The preferable way to conduct a full budget review would be for the whole City Council to be heavily involved at all stages, and have the Finance Subcommittee pursue only items which need more detailed study.
Although the City Charter requires the City Council to include referral of annual city budget considerations to the Finance Subcommittee, the Mayor could insist that all of the departmental presentations be done to the full City Council and then follow ups be done as needed in the Finance Subcommittee.
That would make the discussions much more meaningful. That really important change will only happen when a new city administration breathes fresh life into an inadequate budget process.
The upshot is that, if you have any questions about the budget, you should send them to the following City Councilors: George King, Adam Steiner, Leora Mallach, Michael Cannon and Noval Alexander. You can find their contact information here:
City Councilors Contact Information
2. The Budget Submission Lacks Information Vital for Both City Council Review and Community Engagement
The Mayor’s budget submission details may be found at:
The overarching problem with the Mayor’s submission is that no one in the community can possibly understand what the budget is trying to achieve. In an article addressing this two years ago:
The Framingham Mayor's Sparse FY24 Budget Submission
the problem was summed up as follows:
“What was missing from the budget materials, was a comprehensive budget document which laid out the strategic planning narrative, including the cost drivers, budget priorities, major challenges, etc., and then provided department by department, a description of each department, including its mission and staffing, what was achieved in FY23, what difficulties were encountered in FY23, what the objectives were for FY24 and what resources were needed to achieve those objectives.
What was provided by the city amounts to what would be an Appendix for a comprehensive professional budget document.”
Nothing has improved in two years.
Leaving aside those fundamental problems, which can only be fixed by a complete reworking of the Mayor’s entire budget process, there remains a major ‘truth’ problem in this FY26 budget process, as discussed next.
3. Key Reserve Fund Information Is Deliberately Withheld
It is a requirement of the City Charter that budget information should be as complete as possible, including providing information on the funds available in various reserve accounts maintained by the city. Here is a quote from the City Charter:
“Article VI: FINANCE AND FISCAL PROCEDURES
…
4. THE BUDGET
…
(b) Proposed Operating Budget
…
The budget shall be arranged to show the actual income and expenditures for the previous three fiscal years and the estimated income and expenditures for the current and ensuing fiscal years and shall indicate in separate sections:
…
iv. Estimated surplus revenue and free cash at the end of the current fiscal year, including estimated balances in any special accounts established for specific purposes.”
None of this information is provided in the Mayor’s budget submission.
Fortunately, the Municipal Databank has past year information about these funds, which shows how important they are to include in the Mayor’s budget submission, for anyone to get a complete picture of the city’s fiscal position.
The reserve funds, including their FY24 balances are:
Free cash: $19,903,907
Stabilization Fund: $20,089,706
Special Purpose Stabilization Fund: $8,534,011
Unreserved Undesignated Fund: $28,147,761
That totals about $76.6 million, which is an increase of $17.7 million over the FY23 total. Charts showing data for each of these 4 reserve funds for the last 5 fiscal years are included at the end of this article, for completeness.
No matter what, it is clear that the city has a very large reserve position, which is rising rapidly and could be much more than $80 million for FY25, if reserves have kept on rising as in the past.
The Mayor has to come clean on this vital information. City Council, demand the data required from the Mayor by the City Charter!!!
One of the sources for that rapid reserve fund increase is the money reaped by cutting taxpayer support of the schools by $25 million over the last 3 years, as explained in:
An Educational Crisis is Unfolding in Framingham
Even though that cash will end up funding infrastructure projects, most of those projects are financed through bonding, so the annual cost is way less than $25 million. So, most of the cash taken from the schools is parked in the above reserve funds.
4. Local Funding for the Schools Has Fallen to an 18 Year Low
The bottom line is that the Mayor has siphoned off vital education funds from the schools, parked it in hidden reserve funds, and now claims he cannot come up with the $2.5 million needed to avoid staff cuts in the school system FY26 budget.
Maybe he is building bulging reserves to impress Moody’s when they come in this year for their bond rating review. It would be politically bad for the Mayor to have a bond rating downgrade in an election year.
Whatever the reason, with reserves skyrocketing the Mayor could easily fix the $2.5 million shortfall the school district has in its FY26 budget.
What is the point of building giant reserves, while the school district takes damage?
Worst of all is the simple fact that city support for education has fallen to an 18 year low. Here is a chart of the percentage of tax revenue the school district budget has used over the last 18 years:
Note that the last data point, for FY2026, corresponds to the School Committee approved school budget, without the $2.5 million cut the Mayor wants to force on the schools.
It is clear, from the red section of the data, which corresponds exactly to the Sisitsky regime, that never in the 18 years, beginning with 2009, has city support for education been so consistently low as in the Sisitsky period.
This is why it is fair to say that the Mayor has punished the schools, and especially disadvantaged students, by dramatically cutting local education funding, and City Councilors King and Cannon have been completely on board with that effort, and would like to see more cuts.
This simple chart shows the historic lack of support the Mayor has shown for the schools.
The presentation here of reserve fund information from prior years, should inspire the City Council to demand the Mayor provide it with the projections for FY25, required by the City Charter, and with that information in hand, which almost certainly will show an even larger build up of reserves, the City Council should exercise its power to add $2.5 million to the schools budget.
Parents and teachers all across Framingham should turn up at the budget public hearing on May 13, 2025, at 6pm in City Hall, and demand action to save their schools from another year of Sisitsky damage.
Full Municipal Data Bank Charts
I include charts for each of the four reserve funds discussed above, taken from the Municipal Databank, which show the dramatic rise in city reserves in recent years.
