Topic

Spending, FY2011 to FY2025

How was each dollar of spending growth assigned to a cause?

Annual General Fund spending rose $177 million from FY2011 to FY2025. Inflation on the same staff and services was the largest piece, $75.3 million (42%), then debt service on new school buildings and staffing levels, mostly more school staff per student.

This is the technical companion to How Brookline got here, which tells the same story in plain language: every budget line, every cause, the method behind each assignment and how sure each piece is.

Spending growth by budget line

Since 2005, Brookline's operating spending has grown at roughly 3.65% a year, above the 2.5% Proposition 2½ allows without new growth or an override. (That figure excludes debt service on voter-approved debt exclusions, which is matched dollar for dollar by its own revenue and so nets out on both sides. Including it, total spending grew at 3.92%.) That total is made of pieces growing at very different speeds. Employee benefits, pension contributions, retiree health insurance, and active-employee health insurance, have grown at roughly 5.5% a year. Education, the single largest line, at roughly 4.5%. Everything else, police and fire, public works, libraries, general government, debt service inside the levy, combined, at roughly 2.5%, right in line with what the cap allows on its own.

That last figure is worth pausing on. Most of what the Town does has been growing at almost exactly the rate state law permits. The gap between what is capped and what is spent comes almost entirely from two places.

Debt service in that chart is split in two, because the combined line is misleading. Taken together it grew at 5.17% a year, which reads as a third fast-growing cost alongside schools and benefits. It is not. The part funded by voter-approved debt exclusions went from $1.7 million to $22.0 million, and every dollar of it is matched by its own revenue, raised outside the levy limit for that purpose. The part that actually competes with everything else inside the cap went from $11.6 million to $14.3 million, a growth rate of 1.06% a year, slower than every line on the chart except public works and general government, whose rates since FY2005 are held down by the FY2010 reclassification described below. Brookline's school and infrastructure building program is large and is not free, but it sits outside the operating problem the forecast is about.

All of it, sorted by cause

Growth rates say which lines grew fastest. They do not say why. A second pass answers that directly: take annual General Fund spending in FY2011 ($187.2 million) and in FY2025 ($364.7 million), and assign every dollar of the $177.4 million difference to one of nine causes. Each figure is the difference in one year's spending, not a total added up across fourteen years.

How each dollar gets assigned and why the window starts in FY2011 are set out below.

Three things follow.

Growth in the town itself is a small piece. The homes in the Town's building permits, about 1,250 of them, and 350,000 square feet of commercial space added $7.3M a year of service cost, 4% of the increase. New homes add real costs; they are small next to inflation, debt service and staffing levels. Growth: when a new home pays for itself takes up whether they pay for themselves.

About a third was Brookline's own choice. Staffing levels, routine and voter-approved borrowing, retiree health prefunding, and pay and benefits above or below the benchmarks add to $64.8 million (37%) of the increase, or 41% counting growth, which zoning and permitting shape. Most of the rest, 55%, was set outside Brookline (inflation, state assessments) or by obligations already incurred (the pension shortfall). The lines are judgement calls. Pay rates are bargained locally, so Brookline has some say over the part filed under Inflation too; only the part of pay growth that differs from the national benchmark is counted here as a local decision.

The staffing piece is almost all schools. The district had 6.75 students per staff member in FY2011 and 5.62 in FY2025. Had staff moved one-for-one with enrollment, it would have about 208 fewer positions, which at about $94,000 each in salary is $19.6 million. The endpoints hide the path: from FY2011 to FY2019 enrollment rose 18.5% and staff 34%; after COVID enrollment fell 10.6% and staff 5.0%. About 150 of the positions beyond enrollment were added while enrollment was rising; measured against today's smaller enrollment, about 135 of them remain, and about 73 more are positions kept after it fell. The section on schools below looks at what those positions do.

The pension piece has an end date. Nearly all of its growth is paying down past underfunding, and that payment ends when the system reaches full funding, which the Town projects for 2030. The forecast: method and results returns to what happens to that money.

How each dollar gets assigned

Each budget line starts from what it cost in FY2011. For the town departments and the schools, three questions are asked in order, and each answer is filed under one of the nine causes:

What would the FY2011 operation cost in FY2025 if nothing changed but pay and prices? Staff costs grow with the national Employment Cost Index for state and local government workers, and other costs (contracts, supplies, utilities) grow with Boston consumer prices. The difference is categorized as Inflation.

How many more staff were there, and how many would growth have needed? Staff needed for new homes and commercial space are categorized as New homes & commercial space, and staff for other enrollment change as Enrollment not from new homes. Staff beyond that are categorized as Staffing levels.

What is left? That is categorized as Pay & costs vs inflation. It is a leftover, not a measurement of one thing.

Benefits and debt are handled separately because they don't behave like wages. Health insurance is split into premium inflation, more people covered, and a leftover. Pension contributions are split into the cost of pensions employees earn each year and the payment toward pensions already earned but not yet funded (Past pension shortfall). Debt service is categorized as Buildings.

Why start in FY2011

The state's spending data for Brookline goes back to FY2005, but in FY2010 about $6 million moved between spending categories: the five town department categories fell 12.9% that year while total spending fell 2.3%. Comparing any year before FY2010 with any year after would mix that relabeling with real change, and it made General Government and Public Works look far more restrained than they were. FY2011 is the first full year on the new basis, and it is also the earliest year for which the Town's benefits detail and spending-by-type actuals are available in the Financial Plans used here.

The benchmarks. Over FY2011–25, national public-sector compensation rose 2.79% a year (+47% in total), Boston consumer prices 2.53% (+42%), and the public-sector benefits index 3.44% (+61%). BLS doesn't publish the pay index by state. The closest Massachusetts check is BLS average pay for local government workers, which grew 3.40% a year in Massachusetts against 3.65% nationally from 2014 to 2024. So the national benchmark doesn't understate Massachusetts pay growth; if anything it runs slightly ahead.

Does staff turnover raise costs?

Turnover with the same number of positions moves costs in both directions, and only one direction lasts past the employee's departure.

Pay usually goes down. A new hire usually starts lower on the pay scale than the person who left, while the staff who stay move up it. Both effects are inside Pay & costs vs inflation, and this data can't separate them; that would need payroll records by employee.

Pensions don't add a new Town payment when someone leaves. The Town pays for each pension while the employee is working (the normal cost), and retirees are paid from the retirement fund. Departures add cost only when actual experience differs from the actuaries' assumptions, for example longer lifespans or earlier retirements, and that shows up in the payment toward the unfunded liability.

Retiree health insurance does add cost. The Town covers retirees and their survivors on its health plan. In FY2025, 1,659 of the plan's 3,390 subscribers were retirees, about half, up from 1,459 in FY2011 (0.92% a year). They are a smaller share of the cost, about 36% in FY2024, since many are on Medicare supplement plans, and the forecast weights them that way. So retirement adds a health subscriber without removing one, since the position is refilled. In this breakdown, retirees sit inside the health leftover, which is small ($0.2 million) because total subscribers grew about in line with staff. Prefunding future retiree health is what the OPEB contributions are for.

Other costs of departures are small: unemployment compensation (about $0.5 million a year or less) and payouts of unused leave, which sit in department budgets.

Growth in the town itself

New homes add real costs, and they are small next to everything else. $7.3M a year compares with $75.3 million for inflation, $26.8 million for debt service and $27.0 million for staffing levels. This page covers costs only; the tax revenue those homes bring is a separate question, taken up in Growth: when a new home pays for itself.

Town services for new homes

about 1,250 net new homes were added over FY2011–25, counted from the Town's building permits, each read one by one (Counting Brookline's homes). This breakdown charges $1,371 per home for town services, taken from the Town's consultant RKG. Of that, $262 is benefits, debt and insurance, which this page counts in the benefits lines instead, so the town-department share used here is $1,109 per home, or $1.4M a year. This look back uses RKG's figure; the forecast uses a lower one, $660 a home, from a comparison across all Massachusetts towns (assumptions register).

RKG puts 88% of that $1,109 in police ($448) and fire ($532), with general government at $57, public works $48, library $19 and the rest under $10 each. That reflects RKG's judgment, line by line through the FY2025 budget, about which costs rise with households. Brookline's actual staffing went the other way: public safety positions fell by 5 over FY2011–25, while general government added 24.6, human services 17.8 (12.5 of them at the FY2020/21 data break), public works 8.0 and culture and recreation 3.5. The total added cost roughly matches the model's rate in the one window measured directly (FY2022–24, $1,349 per home), but not the mix.

Students from new homes

At the model's 0.244 students per new home, those homes would bring about 310 students. Staffed at the FY2011 ratio and FY2025 pay, they account for $4.2M a year. A Town and Schools count of ten developments of 8 or more units built since 2015 found between 0.03 and 0.56 enrolled students per unit in Fall 2025, a simple average of about 0.21, so the model's figure sits in the observed range. Net enrollment change over the window was about 400, close to that, which is why Enrollment not from new homes is small, $1.5M. That near-match is a coincidence of endpoints: the path moved much more than new housing could supply.

Commercial space

Non-residential new growth totalled $688 million over FY2012–25, but most of that is personal property, mainly utility equipment, which creates no service demand. In FY2026, the one year with a published split, personal property was 74% of it. At that split, about 350,000 square feet of commercial space was added, roughly 7% of today's stock of about 5.1 million, costing about $0.3 million a year in department services. Treating all non-residential growth as commercial space gives an upper bound of $1.2 million.

For the forecast. Because this piece is small, differences between growth scenarios will move expenses less than the pay, staffing and pension assumptions do.

Pay and costs above and below inflation, by budget line

This is the leftover after inflation and staffing. It holds step and grade raises, turnover, changes in the mix of roles, any gap between Brookline pay and the national benchmark, and, for schools, non-personnel costs growing faster than prices.

Schools ran $8.3 million above the benchmarks. Two things measured elsewhere fit that: the state reports Brookline's average teacher salary rising from $96,000 in FY2018 to $132,000 in FY2025, about 4.7% a year against 3.3% for the national wage benchmark (an average that also moves with the experience mix of the teachers employed), and special education and other non-personnel costs aren't limited to consumer-price growth. Public Safety is the one town department well above the benchmark, with headcount slightly down. Public Works came in $3.0 million below; about 39% of its budget is contracts, fleet and materials, where the consumer price benchmark fits less well. Health premiums tracked the national public-sector benefits index almost exactly.

Schools: the town built for 7,855 students and now has 7,023

The question behind a 4.5%-a-year school budget is whether it reflects more children or the same children costing more. The answer is neither, quite, and the arc matters more than either endpoint.

The two ratio rows are calculated within a single year, so the peak column uses FY2020 for both, the year staffing peaked, rather than FY2019, the year enrollment did. One caution on the teacher-FTE series: DESE's published figure steps down from 555.5 in FY2007 to 477.1 in FY2008 while enrollment rises, which looks more like a change in how the count is compiled than a cut of that size. Comparisons that cross that boundary are worth treating as approximate; comparisons from FY2008 forward are on a consistent footing.

Enrollment rose by nearly a third between 2005 and 2019, 1,871 additional children. That is what drove the wave of school construction, and it is why three of the four overrides in this period were explicitly school-driven. Then it reversed: enrollment has fallen 11% from its peak.

Staffing followed, but not immediately, and the per-FTE ratios show the sequence. Enrollment dropped by 886 students in FY2021; teacher FTE rose that year, to its own peak of 674.6, and students per teacher fell to 10.21, the lowest in the twenty years. Teacher FTE has come down every year since, and by FY2025 the ratio is 12.91, higher than at any point since FY2015. The adjustment did happen; it ran two to four years behind the enrollment change that prompted it.

What did not reverse is the composition. Students with individual education programs grew from 999 in FY2010 to 1,270 in FY2025, up 27%, and kept rising, from 1,179 to 1,270, after total enrollment began to fall in FY2021. As a share of the district they went from 15.4% to 18.1%. Special education is more staff-intensive per student by design and by law, so a district can shrink and still need more people. Inside a declining total staff count, the mix shifted toward special-education support and away from classroom teachers: teacher FTE is down 18% from FY2020 while total staff is down only 9%.

This is the honest answer to "why do school costs keep rising when there are fewer children." Measured from the FY2020 peak, the district employs fewer people. Measured from FY2011, it employs more per student: 5.62 students per staff member against 6.75, the Staffing levels piece above. Both are true, and the difference is the arc. Staff were added while enrollment rose and only partly withdrawn when it fell, and the mix shifted toward special-education support, to serve a student population with different needs, in buildings sized for a larger district. Against 17 peer districts Brookline is the 7th most staffed of 18 (5.6 students per staff member against a peer median of 5.9) with the 4th highest needs, so its staffing is somewhat above its peers and so are its needs. Enrollment: three forecasts compared carries the enrollment forecast forward.

Benefits: the slower clock

Benefits are the fastest-growing line in the budget and the one least responsive to any decision the Town makes in a given year. Between Brookline's two most recent actuarial valuations (January 2022 and January 2024), active employees in the pension system grew from 1,347 to 1,367 (+1.5%) while retirees and beneficiaries already drawing a pension grew from 891 to 929 (+4.3%), retirees growing nearly three times as fast as actives, over just two years.

The two large unfunded liabilities behind this do not move smoothly. Brookline's net pension liability swung from $184.5 million (2014) down to $125.3 million (2021, a strong investment year) and back to $170.7 million (2023). Net OPEB liability, retiree health benefits, the larger of the two, was $254.5 million and 12.9% funded in 2017, improved to $189.6 million and 32.6% funded by 2023, then rose again to $201.5 million in 2024. Both are investment-return-sensitive; neither is on a straight line.

That shape is worth sitting with. Neither line is a steadily rising debt the Town has been failing to pay down. Both move mostly with investment returns, 2021 is a strong market year on the pension line, and the OPEB line's improvement to 2023 reverses in 2024. A snapshot taken in any single year would support a much more alarming or a much more reassuring story than the decade actually tells.

There is a real turning point ahead. The Town's own funding schedule has the pension system reaching full funding in 2030, with the contribution capacity that frees up redirected to OPEB starting in 2031. It is the single largest piece of good news in the Town's medium-term finances, and what happens to the money it frees is one of the four decisions The forecast: method and results finds matter most. Liabilities, reserves and the credit rating projects both liabilities forward.

Everything else: not more people, more expensive people

Whether the Town keeps hiring can be tested directly against the staffing data. Across five departmental categories, in the Town's budgets from FY2019 to FY2026, headcount grew in four, General Government (+0.99%/yr), Public Works (+0.38%/yr), Human Services (+3.61%/yr, the fastest, with essentially flat cost per employee, more staff, not pricier staff), and Culture & Recreation (+0.52%/yr). None of these is a story about runaway hiring.

Public Safety is the exception, and it runs the other way. Headcount shrank by 0.27%/yr, Police is down 7.5 FTE net, and the Town's own ERSC report footnotes that six officer positions were held open to balance the 2026 budget, while budgeted pay per position grew 3.89% a year, the fastest of any category. That is not more officers; it is the same or fewer officers costing more, driven by arbitrated wage settlements: a 2023 retroactive award, a certification differential stipend rising to 7.5% by 2027, and tenure-based step increases.

This matters for the levers in The forecast: method and results. Public Safety's spending growth, 4.37% a year from FY2020 to FY2025, is a real and ongoing pressure, but it is a wage-and-arbitration story on flat headcount, which is a very different problem from a service-expansion story and responds to very different remedies. Much of the FY2021 to FY2025 rise came from one-time changes, the stipend and new steps, which are already in the FY2027 budget, so the forecast grows Public Safety pay 3.5% a year and adds the fire steps agreed for FY2028 and the four police positions to be refilled in FY2028 and FY2029 on top.

Utilities: in step with prices since 2019

Utilities are a small line, $7.0 million in the FY2027 budget and about 1.7% of General Fund spending: electricity, natural gas, water and fuel for Town vehicles. The Town pays utilities for the school buildings as well as its own, so the General Fund line covers all of them.

Spending on utilities went from $5.0 million in FY2011 to $4.8 million in FY2019, a slight fall while Boston-area prices rose 1.9% a year. From FY2019 to FY2024 it grew 3.5% a year, the same as prices (3.5%), with a dip in FY2020 when buildings closed and a jump with energy prices in 2022 and 2023. The budgets since then expect faster growth: the FY2027 budget is 6.9% a year above the FY2024 actual, $5.7 million. Budgets often run above what is spent, so that is the Town's expectation rather than a measured trend.

The forecast grows utilities with prices, 2.5% a year. If they grew 6% a year from the FY2027 budget instead, FY2040 would be about $5.3 million worse.

Source: Town Financial Plans, FY2006 to FY2027; actual spending through FY2024, budgets after. FY2019 to FY2022 are added up from each plan's department tables, a method that reproduces the General Fund totals the plans print to within $2,000. Prices are the Boston-area consumer price index. The year-by-year figures, with the source of each, are on GitHub.

How sure these numbers are

In order of how much each could move the picture:

Growth costs are allocations at the model's rates. The total per home matches one observed three-year window, but the department mix doesn't match where Brookline actually added staff.

The school personnel share (81%) is derived, from total General Fund personnel minus town department personnel. FY2024 on the same basis gives about 83%. For comparison, pay is about 76% of Town department spending: 86% in Public Safety, 78% in General Government, 83% in Human Services, 61% in Public Works and 52% in Culture and Recreation (FY2019 budgeted salaries over actual spending; the FY2026 budget gives similar shares).

Pensions earned in FY2011 are carried back two years from the 2014 valuation. The 2010 valuation would pin it exactly; the remaining error is a few hundred thousand dollars.

Town staff counts cross a data break in FY2020/21 (18.5 positions).

The commercial split uses one year of the commercial and personal property mix.

The Town's expense-type tables for FY2014–18 were not used. They repeat the same figures under different year labels, so only FY2011, FY2023 and FY2024 actuals feed the non-personnel check.

Every total on this page is checked: the nine causes sum to the $177.4 million change to the dollar, each budget line sums to its own change, and the town department split reproduces an earlier, independent breakdown of the same years.

Go deeper

• How Brookline got here, in full: Why has Brookline's budget kept outgrowing what Proposition 2½ allows it to collect?
• Schools: staffing, costs and open seats: How is Brookline's school system staffed, what does an added student cost, and how much room do the schools have?
• Liabilities, reserves and the credit rating: How large are the Town's long-term obligations and reserves?
• The forecast: method and results: How is the forecast built, and how does it compare with the Town's plan?

Last updated 2026-10-16. What has changed.