I've been a proud Stoneham resident for 10 years, and like many of you, I've contributed what I can to our community through time and donations. Following last April's failed override vote many residents took to social media and suggested those who supported the override should donate more taxes to the town if they felt so strongly the town needed more money.

We need to set the record straight. I have actually tried to find a way to donate toward our town and school's operating budgets and discovered it is legally impossible.

Massachusetts law prohibits using charitable donations for municipal operating expenses and salaries. Under MGL Chapter 44, Section 53A, donations must be segregated into separate accounts and spent only for donor-specified purposes. They cannot be commingled with general operating funds.

State funding formulas explicitly exclude donations from required appropriations, meaning even if someone donated a million dollars "for general town operations," it could not count toward our budget requirements or be used to pay the salaries which make up 60-70% of our operating costs. This has been confirmed directly by our Town Administrator at the Override Community Engagement Session on October 20th (discussion starts at 54:27) There is literally no mechanism to donate money that goes toward operational expenses. If you overpay your taxes, you simply get a credit.

The town does maintain four worthy donation accounts for scholarships and tax relief for veterans, elderly, and disabled residents, not to mention the existing ways to contribute to schools through PTOs and Boosters. I encourage everyone to support these causes, but they cannot address our structural deficit.

Essential services like police, fire, public works, schools, libraries and senior services require guaranteed, predictable, recurring funding that grows with inflation and cost increases. Donations are unpredictable, volatile, and insufficient by orders of magnitude. You can't pay a teacher's salary or a firefighter's benefits package with donations and hope the same amount materializes again next year.

As a town, we must address root causes of the budget shortfall, not just symptoms. The only legal, sustainable, and honest way for citizens to address this shortfall is through the mechanism designed for exactly this purpose: raising our taxes through an override. Many of us are ready to accept that responsibility because we understand that a functioning town with quality schools, safe streets, and vital services such as the library and senior center isn't a luxury--it's a shared investment we all make together.