WELLFLEET — Town Administrator Tom Guerino is even busier than usual, says his executive assistant, as Wellfleet embarks on a new kind of financial review. For the first time, a panel combining the select board and finance committee is looking at the proposed fiscal 2026 town budget together — section by section, department by department.
Gathering in makeshift conference rooms in the town hall basement and the yoga room of Wellfleet’s Adult Community Center, members of the select board and finance committee and individual department heads have undertaken the review process in a series of public meetings that began on Jan. 21 and were to be concluded on Jan. 29. Individual department heads joined the meetings in person and on Zoom to answer questions about their budget requests.
In recent years, drafting Wellfleet’s budget has not been an enviable task. “Years and years of dysfunction, negligence — not just financially, but in infrastructure, too — all landed in the lap of this select board and this administration,” select board chair John Wolf told the Independent.
In 2023, the Mass. Dept. of Revenue delivered a stern rebuke to Wellfleet, citing the town’s disorganized and inconsistent bookkeeping. Longstanding financial problems generated concern that the Commonwealth would recommend receivership for the town. Recent large purchases, including Maurice’s Campground in 2022 and the Gestalt Center in 2024, have strained the town’s finances.
Compared to the tumult of recent years, the proposed fiscal 2026 town budget is fairly straightforward, said Guerino. “There’s no unicorns or lollipops in this one,” he said. Even so, the difference between the town’s forecasted revenues and expenditures leaves little wiggle room, and Guerino told the select board on Jan. 14 to prepare for a potential shortfall.
Since that warning, he has become more optimistic. The gap was “tightening up a little each week,” Guerino told the Independent. “There will probably be a necessity to either augment the budget through free cash or an override or reduce the budget by an amount to make it even. That’s up to the select board.” All told, Guerino said, the town will need to be “judicious about taking new things on that are going to be costly.”
The budget review meetings did not include public comment sessions, and Guerino and Wolf both emphasized that the draft was provisional. “This can all still be amended,” Wolf said. The budget “doesn’t go on the town meeting warrant until the select board takes a vote, and we won’t take a vote before a public hearing.”
On Jan. 22 and 27, the joint committee heard updates from the shellfish dept., the dept. of public works (DPW), the marina, and the community services dept. The shellfish dept. budget was later revised, as the committee determined that a dramatic increase in staff salaries on the budget sheet was a mistake. Updated totals for the shellfish dept. and the DPW are now available on the town’s website.
Other notable items included an estimated increase of between $18,000 and $90,000 in the Cape Cod Mosquito Control Project line to maintain Wellfleet’s greenhead fly control and larvicide treatment, and the police dept.’s request for an additional $46,325 to replace leased body camera equipment. The last represents the largest increase in any individual nonsalary budget item, according to the 2026 budget book. At the Jan. 27 meeting, Police Chief Kevin LaRocco requested a total budget of over $2.5 million for his department. The fire dept.’s $3.3-million requested budget is the largest section of the town’s projected expenses for fiscal 2026, exempting the capital budget.
For his final budget forecast, Guerino is still waiting for the Mass. Dept. of Revenue (DOR) to certify the town’s free cash account — that is, its use of unspent, unrestricted funds from the previous fiscal year. In 2023, after three years of accounting chaos that led the state to withhold certification, the certification arrived just in time.
This year, the town submitted its requisite financial statements to the DOR in November and expects to receive free cash certification in the coming weeks. Guerino requested that the finance committee delay drafting the capital budget, which includes several allotments for the Wellfleet Elementary School, until receiving that certification.
Faced with the time crunch of approving the budget before spring’s annual town meeting, committee members discussed creating a task force that would work year-round on budgetary matters and not just ahead of the annual review. On Jan. 28, Guerino proposed a “town administrator working group,” in which members of the select board, finance committee, and regional school committee would convene on a regular basis to discuss municipal issues. “We have an opportunity to talk about where we are midyear and what our priorities need to be fiduciarily going forward,” he told the joint committee.
Among the goals of the review was to identify inconsistencies between the three versions of the draft budget — the 2026 budget book spreadsheet, the draft budget produced in the accounting software called VADAR, and the actual budget itself — and, in fact, inconsistencies appeared frequently.
“Last year, I swore I wouldn’t change the forms for the following year,” Guerino told the joint committee on Monday. “But that was before I saw this year’s forms.” Inputting accounting requests in VADAR has caused hiccups among the town’s departments, and Town Accountant Suzanne Moquin, a certified VADAR instructor, has worked to train different departments “as time allows,” Guerino said.
Still, at Monday’s meeting, Guerino cast VADAR favorably as the “Chevrolet” of government accounting software systems. “It may not have the bells and whistles of Munis or other programs,” he said, “but it’s solid and gets the job done.”
A forum to hear public comment on the final draft of the budget will take place in February.
