Just prior to Town Meeting, an annual report is published and distributed to registered voters of the Town and the School District (in the past those were the same voters). This changed, to some extent, in 2020 because the school district merged in to a large district which is no longer directly overseen by just the voters in Townshend. So, the school district report is now published by the larger district and is no longer published in conjunction with the Town of Townshend report

Both entities are on a fiscal year accounting basis so the report will include actual financial figures for one year, voted expenditures for the current year, the year that Town Meeting is held, and requested budgetary figures for the coming year which starts July 1, 4 months after Town Meeting. To clarify, the report available at the Town Meeting in March of 2015 included actual numbers for 2013/14, voted, yet not yet fully expended figures for 2014/15, and requested budget figures for July 1, 2015 through June 30 of 2016. These reports are mailed only to registered voters as a matter of routine but property owners who are not registered voters may request that a report be mailed to them.

In past years, prior to 2015/2016, the report was prepared by the Town Auditors and possibly volunteers that help with design and layout. Now Townshend hires a professional auditing firm and the report is prepared by numerous town officers and employees. The School District uses the services of a professional auditing firm whose numbers are either presented in the report or available separately. In both cases, “audited” figures will only be the final figures of the last full fiscal year.

Also included in the overall report are a variety of written reports from various elected officials, community related entities, a brief of activities of the social service organizations that have requested funding, births, deaths, and marriage licenses issued. So, it is not just numbers but a snapshot in time. Townshend no longer prints the names of delinquent tax payers in the town report, just the numbers, folks.

The reports of the two legal entities were combined into one publication which is generally known as “The Town Report”. This  changed as of 2019 as the Townshend School District no longer exists. The West River Education District is now responsible for publishing the annual report for all the schools it oversees. It will not be included here.

Please note that these are very large files and, yes, we do still have people on dial-up here and in many locations in Vermont so the notice is necessary.

No specific search function has been set up for these. Doing an entire site search on the home page, or other pages with a search box, will bring up information from the reports. However, due to the large amount of text in the reports, searching is best accomplished by opening up the document and using the special search function (find) in Adobe or your browser. Text overlaps greatly from year to year thus leading to a frustrating search experience if you were to try to search all of them at once. (Too much information.)

TOWNSHEND VERMONT TOWN AND SCHOOL DISTRICT REPORTS

Again, it should be noted that, starting with the 2018/2019 Annual Report, the school district is no longer included since the Townshend School District is now part of the larger WRED District.

Photo courtesy Steven Meyer