I am pleased to report that our CFO Mary Ellen Kelley has included an analysis of our budget and charts similar to the ones I have been creating. It seems there is no longer a need for me to do this.

Thank you Mary Ellen. Your report, written and oral, to the 2007 Annual Town Meeting was excellent!

Laurie Lee

FY06 General Fund Revenue and Expenditure Summary  click here

For easy reading, the large items for this budget can be plotted as below:

Framingham Revenue's

Framingham's Expenses:

FY05 General Fund Revenue and    Updated for 2005 Final Numbers as published in FY'06 Budget
Expenditure Summary As Amended at
October 19, 2004 STM
 

For easy reading, the large items for this budget can be plotted as below:

Framingham Revenue's

Framingham's Expenses:

Moody's gives Framingham an A

 Well actually, Framingham is an Aa3 (Aaa is the best and Baa3 the worst). In order to get an idea of what this rating means,  I used the most current list, October 2004,of Moody's bond rating for Massachusetts. Of the 351 Cities and Towns in Massachusetts, only 257 had current ratings. Of these, 38 are cities and 219 are Towns and they are distributed as seen below:

Since there are so few cities compared to towns I decided to chart them separately.

I looked at what percentage of the 38 Cities were in each Moody's rating.

I also looked at what percentage of the 219 Towns were in each Moody's ratings.

From this one can conclude that about 15% of the Towns are scored higher than Framingham. However, Framingham is in the top 17% bracket for Towns.

In addition, while it is difficult to compare Cities to Towns in this situation, it is clear that the overall Moody's rating for Cities is lower than for towns. Most likely this, and most of the differences, can be attributed to Median Income Levels.