Middleborough · Select Board & Finance Committee

The Select Board and the Finance Committee have put off their recommendations twice, waiting on numbers the town is still assembling. Twelve of the 24 articles carry a dollar figure, and $860,636 of that closes out holes from fiscal 2026 and earlier.

John Barrella · The G.O.A.T. News  |  November 2, 2026

Middleborough — Seven days before Town Meeting, the Select Board and the Finance Committee meet together Monday night to do the thing they have twice declined to do: tell voters what they think of all 24 articles on the Fall Special Town Meeting warrant.

The Finance Committee opens at 6:45 p.m. in the small conference room at Town Hall, 10 Nickerson Ave., then recesses to join the Select Board, which gavels in at 7 p.m. in the Select Board meeting room. Both postings carry the same business in the same words: “Review of Fall 2026 Warrant and vote on favorable or unfavorable actions for articles on the warrant.” The Finance Committee’s own agenda then brings it back to its small conference room for a second pass of its own.

Neither board appropriates a dollar. Their votes are recommendations that voters hear before they act on Monday, Nov. 9, at 7 p.m. in the Middleborough High School auditorium. Town Meeting can follow them, ignore them, or amend the motions put in front of it. Before the warrant review, the two boards will also hear a financial update from Interim Town Manager Robert Nunes.

Why it took three meetings

The delay has been deliberate, and both boards have said so on the record.

On Oct. 5, at the first joint session on this warrant, the Finance Committee voted unanimously to request six items in writing under Section Five of the town charter before making any recommendation. The list reads like a diagnostic of the warrant itself: the method behind the indirect-cost cuts in Articles 6 and 7 and the general fund impact of the resulting $1,296,633 reduction; certified retained earnings for water, wastewater and sanitation; the fiscal 2026 enterprise deficit plan owed to the state Department of Revenue; a reconciliation of Article 2 against the Bristol-Plymouth shortfall and the debt stabilization balance; the cost estimate, town share and financing plan for the school roof in Article 21; and the rate impact of the borrowing in Article 17.

Two weeks later the boards met again and still did not vote. Nunes told the joint session on Oct. 19 that he did not yet have the motions because the funding sources for some articles were under review, and that the figures would come before Town Meeting once the balance sheet is certified. Finance Committee Chair Bob Sullivan said the committee had asked for more information and had a meeting with the town manager set for Oct. 26, and that he was reluctant to vote before it arrived. Nunes noted that both bodies may vote on articles right up to the Town Meeting date. Select Board Chair Teresa Farley agreed that waiting was appropriate. The minutes record that the board “reiterated that it would delay recommendations on warrant articles until all funding sources are clarified.”

That is a different sequence than the town has followed in the recent past, and it is the practical answer to a budget that has been restated more than once. The fiscal 2027 budget built by the former administration balanced until corrections in April opened a gap of $3,378,874, which grew to roughly $3.5 million and cost 19 positions. The Finance Committee is now declining to recommend numbers until the town certifies the sheet those numbers rest on.

What the money articles are for

Twelve of the 24 articles carry a dollar figure, and together they total $3,515,132. They divide cleanly into two piles.

The first pile is repair work. Four articles totaling $860,636 exist to close accounts that are already short. Article 3 covers a $576,041 shortfall in the fiscal 2026 water enterprise budget. Article 4 covers $105,906 in sanitation, though the motion printed beneath it reads $105,960. Article 5 raises $161,769.29 against a deficit in the town’s COVID-19 expenses account, which the warrant attributes to federal reimbursements coming in under what was anticipated. Article 11 pays $16,920 in unpaid bills from prior years, itemized as $9,120 to BLW Engineers, $6,000 to the Edward Collins Center for Public Management, $916.64 to Everon and $884 to Nemasket Week. Those four add to $16,920.64, sixty-four cents more than the article asks for. The warrant adds a line under the list: “Several prior year invoices are not included.” At the Oct. 19 meeting Nunes reported that more had already arrived, from BLW Engineers, for security monitoring systems at the Green School and Oliver House.

The second pile is forward spending, $2,654,495 of it. The two largest items on the warrant sit here. Article 2 adds $1,103,129 to the town’s Bristol-Plymouth Regional High School assessment and its share of the district’s debt, drawing $1,061,571 from the Debt Stabilization Fund and $41,558 from taxation. Article 17 borrows $1,100,000 to replace the sewer force main on Wood Street between the Route 495 bridge and West Grove Street, with the Wastewater Enterprise Fund paying the principal and interest in the first instance. Article 8 puts $200,000 into the trust fund for retiree health benefits. Article 12 pays $56,366.42 in sick leave buy-back to two retiring police employees, and Article 13 sets aside $25,000 for stormwater work the EPA and the state require.

Several of these articles carry a motion to pull the money from the Stabilization Fund rather than from the source the article names, which raises the vote threshold to two-thirds. Articles 3, 4 and 18 each carry a printed amendment to switch the funding source from departmental retained earnings to stabilization. Articles 9 and 10, which would have added $25,000 and $15,000 for fuel, now carry motions to postpone action indefinitely. Article 1, which supplements fiscal 2027 department budgets, is printed with its department table blank, to be filled in “as established by the Town Accountant.”

The $1.3 million that moves between the town’s own pockets

Articles 6 and 7 carry no dollar sign and move more money than almost anything else on the warrant.

Article 6 would cut the indirect costs charged to the water department’s fiscal 2027 budget from $1,611,355 to $1,296,636. Article 7 would cut wastewater’s from $1,865,206 to $883,292, slightly more than half. Added together, the two articles reduce what the ratepayer-funded enterprise accounts send to the general fund by $1,296,633. That is the figure the Finance Committee asked the town to explain on Oct. 5, and it has to come from somewhere else if it does not come from ratepayers.

The town is not defending the current number. Nunes told the Select Board on Oct. 26 that the Finance Committee had endorsed an outside study of indirect costs because of what the minutes call “longstanding inconsistencies in the methodology used to calculate indirect costs,” and that a study would give the town “an objective, externally validated approach” for both the enterprise funds and the general fund. The board voted unanimously that night to solicit proposals through COMMBUYS and the state’s Goods and Services Bulletin, at a cost Nunes estimated would not exceed $12,000. The Finance Committee had endorsed exactly that step three weeks earlier, in a motion that also asked the study to cover the cost of service for water sold to other communities.

That last clause matters on Nov. 9, because Article 19 asks Town Meeting to authorize the Select Board to supply water to Carver and Bridgewater under an agreement running more than two years. The G.O.A.T. News examined the town’s existing arrangement last week.

The forensic audit, and the audit that is already stuck

Behind the warrant sits a question the Finance Committee put to the Select Board five months ago and has not had answered.

On May 28, the committee voted 3 to 2 to recommend that the Select Board consider authorizing and funding an independent forensic review by an outside municipal accounting firm, covering selected financial reporting practices, municipal credit card usage, enterprise funds, snow and ice spending, grant reporting, payroll-related payouts and the internal controls behind them, for fiscal 2022 through 2026. The motion also asked that the town retain counsel to advise on the scope and the process. Sullivan told the committee he had not seen anything like the fiscal 2027 budget in his years around government, and that an outside review was worth the cost whether or not it found wrongdoing. Alan Kirschner and Nathan Demers voted no, both saying they wanted supporting documents and a cost estimate first.

Meanwhile the ordinary audit has stalled. Nunes told the Select Board on Oct. 26 that he and Farley had met with CBIZ, the town’s audit firm, about a communication the auditors had received, and that it “raised several legitimate questions and concerns that must be addressed before the firm can continue work on the Fiscal Year 2025 audit.” Select Board member William Pike Jr. asked whether anything in it surprised him. Nunes said yes. Farley said the board had a copy, and that it was not released earlier because the town was not certain whether it was immediately a public record while the audit was open. Town counsel confirmed that it was. The minutes do not identify who sent the communication. It was this reporter, writing to CBIZ’s engagement team on Oct. 13 as one member of the Finance Committee and not on the committee’s behalf. The G.O.A.T. News published that memo on the same day as the Oct. 26 meeting.

Fiscal 2025 has now been reported four different ways, from a $1.3 million positive variance in the unaudited year-end report to a $57,668 shortfall in the town’s Schedule A filing to the state. The fiscal 2025 audit was already behind in August, when Nunes warned it would not be finished in time for the town’s bond rating call.

The balance sheet, and a tax rate that is not set

The reason both boards keep pointing at the balance sheet is that nearly everything else waits on it.

The town’s finance director retired last month. On Oct. 26 the Select Board voted unanimously to let Nunes engage Michael Ellis, the finance director in Lakeville, to finish Middleborough’s balance sheet and its fiscal 2027 tax rate recap sheet. Ellis will work evenings and weekends at $60 an hour as an independent contractor. Nunes told the board he expected the balance sheet within several weeks and the recap sheet after Town Meeting, which puts the tax rate into December. The town accountant’s job is posted, and Nunes confirmed Ellis is not a candidate for it.

The rates themselves are already drafted. At a hearing the same evening, Assessor Ross Lawrence told the board that the Board of Assessors recommended holding the town’s 5 percent shift between residential and commercial property, which would put fiscal 2027 at roughly $12.66 per $1,000 of residential value and $13.41 for commercial, industrial and personal property. Both are lower than the year before because valuations rose, and fiscal 2027 is a revaluation year. New growth came in above earlier estimates. The board voted unanimously to keep the shift. None of it is final until the recap sheet is done.

Zoning, and the rest of the warrant

Five articles have nothing to do with closing a deficit.

Article 14 would prohibit data centers outright, adding them to the table of uses as not permitted in any of the town’s ten zoning districts, with a definition broad enough to cover the substations, cooling systems and backup generators that come with them. The Planning Board moved toward a town-wide ban in August.

Article 15 would rezone 26.36 acres off East Grove Street from Residence A to General Use, across four parcels. The article heading dates the current zoning map to Oct. 5, 2015, while the bylaw text it amends strikes the date Oct. 5, 2025.

Article 20 would create a Battery Energy Storage System overlay district on top of the General Use A district and add a bylaw governing it. Systems of 100 kilowatt-hours or less would be allowed by right everywhere. Anything larger would need a special permit from the Planning Board and could go only in General Use A.

Article 22, sponsored by the town manager, would stop publishing town meeting warrants in a newspaper and post them instead at each post office, the library, the Town Clerk’s bulletin board and the town website.

Article 23, a citizens petition, would ban automated license plate readers and name Flock Safety, order the town’s three units removed and require the Police Department to delete its data within 30 days. Police Chief Robert Ferreira asked the boards on Oct. 19 to recommend unfavorable action. He said the program is paid for from drug forfeiture funds rather than taxation, that 19 of 44 officers have access, that it has been in use since May 2023 with no misuse found in an automated audit then about 75 percent complete, and that town counsel had advised the bylaw may conflict with state law or the town charter.

Article 21 is the John T. Nichols Middle School roof, and it is the one article whose number nobody has settled. The article itself names no sum, and its motion reads only “Referred to bond counsel.” Facilities Director Andrew Farley told the boards on Oct. 19 that the project runs about $3.6 million; Chair Farley put the town’s share near $1.7 million after a Massachusetts School Building Authority grant of up to 58.37 percent. A figure of $3,830,813 appears in the warrant, printed under Article 17 as that article’s motion, alongside Article 17’s own text about the Wood Street sewer main. One of the two is in the wrong place. Andrew Farley also told the boards the town could be dropped from the MSBA program for five years if the project does not move, and that the school is one of the town’s emergency shelters.

Articles 16 and 24 are housekeeping of a sort. The first accepts Morton Street and Grace Street as public ways. The second transfers Nemasket Park from the Select Board to the Park Commission in perpetuity for active recreation, which is what lets the town build things like a skatepark there.

The rest of the agenda

Outside the warrant, the Select Board takes up a one-year extension of earth removal permit 23-03 on Fuller Street for Fuller Street Development; a request from Hatchet in Hand at 85 Center St. to serve alcohol until 2 a.m. on the night before Thanksgiving; the resignation of Elizabeth Elgosin from the Zoning Board of Appeals and the promotion of associate member Nancy Kefalis to fill her seat; three new ZBA alternates drawn from four applicants who appeared on Oct. 22, with staggered terms to be discussed; a complaint form and hearing notice template for the animal control hearing officer; the appointment of Jasper Freeman to the Cultural Council; and volunteers to hang winter banners on Centre, Wareham, South Main and North Main streets.

One item connects to a story this outlet has followed for more than a year. Under item 5h the board votes on the street name “Surfside Drive” at 177 East Grove St., the parcel behind the proposed surf park.

The board itself

The Select Board is Teresa Farley as chair, Thomas White as vice chair, Brian Giovanoni, William Pike Jr. and Tracie Craig-McGee. All five signed the warrant in October, and it was served by Police Chief Robert Ferreira, who published an attested copy in Nemasket Week on Oct. 22, more than the fourteen days a special town meeting requires.

The Finance Committee is Bob Sullivan as chair, with Alan Kirschner, Nathan Demers, Eric Machado, Michael Croatti, Matt Phillips and this reporter. The committee’s minutes for Oct. 19 and Oct. 26 are not yet public; both come up for approval at Monday’s 6:45 p.m. meeting.

Barrella serves on the Middleborough Finance Committee and the Town Manager Search Committee. The Finance Committee is one of the two bodies voting Monday night, and he is a member of it; he moved the three Finance Committee motions of Oct. 5 described above and the May 28 forensic audit motion, and he wrote the Oct. 13 memo to the town’s auditors that this article refers to. Matt Phillips, who seconded the May 28 motion, also sits on the Finance Committee and co-hosts The G.O.A.T. Podcast. The views expressed by Barrella as a committee member are his own and not those of the Finance Committee or the Town Manager Search Committee.