Straight from the Source:
We are committed to providing accurate information in order to empower voters to make the most informed decision about the override.
WATCH THE FULL RECORDING OF THE OVERRIDE WEBINAR HERE
Jayne Wellman
“Some folks think that the town has not done the work of going through all of these reductions and what the impacts would be over time, and I just wanted to reiterate to the public that we’ve been working on this night and day for the better part of six months, and as you can see from our Chiefs today and our Library Director who are very well informed of how their budgets work and how their staffing works and have done an excellent job at educating Sharon and I over the years and particularly in the last six months about what the implications would be of these budget cuts.”
Town Manager
Richard Nelson
Fire Chief
“The ideal staffing level would add four additional [to the current staffing level] which we are unable to do. If we have to do staffing reductions [if the override does not pass], and that number is four, we would then have to reduce our current staffing by four. So, then we would have 11 personnel assigned per shift.”
FY28 Override Forum 9-30-2026
See Fire Chief Nelson’s override impact slide deck here
David Clark
Chief of Police
“People are not going to leave their current agency to come to us if there are risks of layoffs, and that is going to reverberate through the law enforcement community. We’re going to have a more difficult time attracting the top, the best of the best candidates, and that’s just an honest statement. What it saves us to get those people, what it saves the Town of Reading, is a significant amount.”
Christine Amendola
“Policing in general has been harder to hire for, and we have been so fortunate to be an agency that people want to come to, and so if the override did not pass and we had to have layoffs, it would be a scary future for us hiring. It would be very different because we never want to lower our standards, but it would be a lot more difficult if and when we are ever able to hire again.”
FY28 Override Forum 9-30-2026
Deputy Chief of Police
See Chief Clark and Deputy Chief Amendola’s override impact slide deck here
Amy Lannon
“Being certified allows us to apply for certain grants. If we're not certified, we are ineligible for certain state and federal grants. Once you're decertified, public libraries can choose not to offer any services. So on the back end, there's a little carrot in terms of finance. We get a little bit more as long as we stay certified, as long as the town keeps funding us. On the front end for the public, loss of certification can just mean a denial of service at other libraries.”
FY28 Override Forum 9-30-2026
Library Director
Dr. Henry Turner
Superintendent of Reading Public Schools
“So, there’s been no decision on fees for kindergarten for next year. Certainly, in conversations around what would happen if the override failed, going back to a kindergarten fee has been discussed. It’s been raised to us. Reading eliminated fees for full-day kindergarten a number of years ago, and there is, to my knowledge, no district that has gone back to it. There are just over 10 districts in our state now that still have a fee for full-day kindergarten.”
FY28 Override Forum 9-30-2026
Jayne Wellman
“Level-funded budget means that, from year to year, the budget number—the line-item number—hasn’t changed. If it’s $2,500 and it’s level-funded in FY25, it’s $2,500 level-funded in FY26...
A level-services budget means that the number is going up incrementally to keep pace with inflation. You usually see level-services budgets on the salary side ... We’re providing the same level of service. We’re not increasing our service, and we’re not decreasing our service. It’s the same level of service, but it offers an increase in the line item.
When it’s level-funded, you may not be offering the same level of service over time because inflationary pressures reduce how much that dollar will buy.”
Town Manager
“We have costs increasing beyond 2 ½ % and we’re using one-time monies to [satisfy the structural deficit in our budget]. Free cash is one-time monies which we regenerate through departments not spending their full budgets and through interest income, things like that.
Next year, FY28, we are anticipating a $9.8 million structural deficit. So, it's a $6.5 million override. We would still need about $3 million. and we would ask the finance committee to support that.
So, the override is not looking to solve the full structural deficit. The override is looking to get us to a point where we can be sustainable and use free cash dollars that we are confident we will regenerate annually to make that difference.”
FY28 Override Forum 9-30-2026
Sharon Angstrom
“I would say that we’re in a good space using the $3 million because, I’m on my 15th year, every year since I’ve been here we’ve regenerated $3 million or more, even in hard times.
So I feel like if we’re keeping it somewhere in that range of what capital is, capital varies from year to year based on what we have going on and we can control that. If things start to get tight, we can say - okay we’ll do just a little under 5% this year.
Generally, 3 million is a somewhat stable number for us and so I think it's a good practice especially where the majority of communities do use their free cash for capital and that 5% is built into our operating budget.”
FY28 Override Forum 9-30-2026
Chief Financial Officer
Stay tuned! More information from Reading’s Town officials will be posted here soon…