The Lunenburg Budget Project

An independent, checkable archive of the Lunenburg, Massachusetts town and school budget: 3,877 documents, 73 datasets, and 1,422 agendas and sets of minutes across 40 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:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tjloughlin16/lunenburgbudgetapp/main/<path>

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. 3,877 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Every figure is interpolated from the model, never typed into prose. Including the counts in this file.

Running it

npm install --prefix fy28
python3 scripts/sync_archive.py --pull      # the documents; the manifest says what
python3 model/export.py                     # -> fy28/src/data/model.json
npm run --prefix fy28 build:site            # -> fy28/dist

CLAUDE.md lists every check. The ones that guard what this file describes:

python3 scripts/build_readme.py --check       # this file, against the repository
python3 scripts/build_api.py                  # every dataset, fetchable
node fy28/scripts/check-agents.mjs            # every advertised URL answers, and can be read
python3 scripts/check_archive_storage.py      # the archive against its manifest

Generated by scripts/build_readme.py. Edit that, not this.