The results of Saturday’s ballot are in, and the override passed.

I know there will be a variety of reactions across town today. Some will celebrate this as a lifeline for the town’s ability to provide the services our community expects. Others will see this as a failure of fiscal restraint and worry about their own ability to handle the resulting tax increase.

But we need to move past the immediate reactions and talk about a larger, more uncomfortable truth. Passing this override means we bought ourselves exactly a year. A lack of strategic thought and long-term planning has put Duxbury in a reactive posture. Without a fundamental shift in how we govern, we are guaranteed to have these year-to-year funding debates for the foreseeable future.

How We Got Here

Unfortunately, for the past two years, we’ve been playing ping-pong with the town’s financial future.

During the FY26 planning cycle, the Town Manager formed a Sustainable Budget Task Force. This was a private working group without posted meetings, operating out of the public eye. They eventually emerged with a 5-year excess levy capacity plan. Because the community wasn’t brought along for the ride, the plan lacked the necessary public scrutiny and buy-in. By the time a series of department budget presentations were held in January 2025, the decision train had largely left the station.

Then came the FY27 cycle. The Selectboard concluded that they had asked for too much in FY26 and correctly expressed a desire to get involved in the budgeting process much earlier in the spring. However, good intentions require strategic execution.

During the initial planning meetings in May, the Finance Director appropriately asked the board for high-level strategic direction to build the upcoming budget. This was the moment for the board to define a multi-year economic policy or set clear revenue goals. Instead, lacking a long-term financial strategy, they struggled to provide actionable policy directives. Faced with this void, the Finance Director was forced to direct the Selectboard to complete a tactical prioritization ranking in Microsoft Excel. In other words: “Which service do you think is most important? Which comes in second? Third?” and so on.

The Selectboard had explicitly asked for early involvement to shape the town’s financial strategy, but when the moment came, they simply could not rise to the task. We abandoned long-term planning for a one-year band-aid. By forcing departments to rank their survival needs against a growing structural deficit, the town artificially pitted essential services—like public safety, DPW, and schools—against one another.

Boiled down: We asked for too much last year without an open public process, got scared, and asked for a lot less this year without a strategic plan. That is governing by reactionary management.

The Math We Can’t Ignore

In September, our Finance Director laid out the reality very clearly: Duxbury is facing increasing deficits through 2030. We knew this was coming. Yet, instead of building a multi-year economic strategy to address it, we fell into a reactive cycle. We scraped by, pitted departments against one another, and ultimately had to ask the taxpayers for a bailout.

I am not writing this to give myself or any town board a free pass. Pointing out a problem without offering a path forward is just complaining. Here are two structural solutions we need to pursue immediately:

1: A Public Revenue Task Force

Even with the passage of this override, I frequently hear from residents who understandably want to ensure the town is running as efficiently as possible. That is a completely fair expectation, and it is a core part of fiscal responsibility.

I want to be fully transparent: we are already operating incredibly lean. The financial realities of the past year forced us to make incredibly difficult choices to balance the books. We went far beyond trimming the margins and made deep structural cuts. The FY26 austerity budget resulted in the loss of over 20 positions in the Duxbury Public Schools alone, along with many other painful reductions across our municipal departments.

This override merely stops the bleeding. It gives the schools enough oxygen to claw back a fraction of staff. It does not fix the long-term math. We have reached the point where running any “leaner” means fundamentally reducing the core services our community values. We cannot cut our way to excellence, and we cannot keep returning to the residential taxpayers every 12 months just to maintain the status quo. We need new, sustainable revenue.

As I mentioned, the town’s previous Sustainable Budget Task Force operated behind closed doors. That is the wrong approach. I believe the Selectboard should immediately move to create a public task force and hold open, public hearings. We have incredibly smart residents in Duxbury with deep backgrounds in finance, real estate, and business. Let’s bring them to the table in the daylight. Let’s aggressively explore how to create new revenue streams—including discussions about potentially expanding our commercial tax base—to take the pressure off residential homeowners.

And to be clear, if this public task force can also identify genuine, structural ways for the town to operate more efficiently, that is a win we should all welcome. But those recommendations must be concrete and actionable. To truly move the needle, we must look past broad concepts—like vague comments about AI, or assuming administrative cuts alone can balance the budget—and do the hard work of building mathematically sound strategies. We need serious solutions for a serious problem.

2: Stop Blaming the Tools

When residents ask why it is so hard to get clear financial data from the town, leadership often points the finger at our “legacy” website platform, CivicPlus, claiming we need a new vendor or a dedicated PR specialist to communicate effectively.

But guess what? Dozens of other Massachusetts towns use CivicPlus. In fact, towns like Reading and Chatham have recently won Massachusetts Municipal Association (MMA) awards for having the best municipal websites in the state using the exact same platform.

The software is capable. Our problem is process.

Much like the criticism that Duxbury builds beautiful buildings but fails to maintain them, we have a website but no operational discipline to manage it. Currently, there is no consistency in how town departments post information. There are no standardized templates.

Instead of spending taxpayer money on a new vendor to fix a process problem, I suggest we leverage the local talent we already have. We have at least a half-dozen residents who run their own website consultancies, marketing agencies, or both. Why not ask for their time to volunteer and help to set up simple, standardized templates within our existing site? If we give our departments a consistent framework to pour their data into, transparency and clean communication become automatic.

We cannot outsource political courage to a web developer, and we cannot solve humongous deficits behind closed doors. If we want to stop fighting over year-to-year survival budgets, we have to start leading for the next decade.

We need radical transparency. We need community collaboration. And we need an actual strategy. As always, I encourage you to attend the upcoming School Committee and Selectboard meetings. Speak up during public comment. Ask to see the data, and ask for a long-term plan.

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Note: The views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect the official policies, positions, or endorsements of the Duxbury School Committee. For official information about Duxbury Public Schools and the Duxbury School Committee, please visit duxbury.k12.ma.us.