The Lunenburg Budget Project
An independent, checkable archive of the Lunenburg, Massachusetts town and school budget:
47,181 documents, 380 datasets, and 12,273 agendas and sets
of minutes across 51 town boards. Not affiliated with the Town of Lunenburg, the
School Committee or the school district.
The site is https://lunenburgbudgetproject.org. This repository is everything behind it.
Start there: the data API · an MCP server ·
every published address · the guide for agents.
If you are an agent, start here
Read fy28/public/llms.txt first. It is written for you:
what this archive holds, what it does not, and the specific ways to get a confident wrong
answer out of the data.
If you can reach the site, use it — every address below has a live equivalent and the site
serves smaller, indexed forms. If you can only reach GitHub, fetch raw files directly; no
clone is needed:
Nothing in fy28/public/api/ is larger than one fetch. Anything that would be is split
— staff_roster_entries.json is an index and staff_roster_entries/2022.json is that year.
The documents themselves are not in this repository. 47,181 files, 1.47 GB, live
in a public object store; sources/data/archive-manifest.csv lists every one with its
sha256 and python3 scripts/sync_archive.py --pull fetches them. The extracted text IS
here, under sources/*/text/, and that is what the analysis reads.
Where things are
The rules this project works under
CLAUDE.md carries them in full and each one exists because it was learned by getting it
wrong here. The four that matter most to anybody reading the data:
- Never mix budgets with actuals in one calculation. They differ by up to 59% on some
lines, and a growth rate measured from one to the other is partly growth and partly the
step between them.
- A budget line is NET, and it is dollars. It is what the town must raise after
grants, fees and state aid — not what the thing costs, and never a count of people.
- Only facts are stated as facts. A number computed from the data is a fact; an
explanation for why it moved is a hypothesis, and it is labelled as one.
- Every figure is interpolated from the model, never typed into prose. Including the
counts in this file.
Running it
CLAUDE.md lists every check. The ones that guard what this file describes:
Generated by scripts/build_readme.py. Edit that, not this.