At Annual Town Meeting Saturday, April 6, voters will be asked to approve 26 articles. The warrant—the meeting’s agenda—is devoted primarily to financial matters. A second Town Meeting is usually convened in the fall to consider changes to the town’s bylaws as well as pressing financial decisions that can’t wait until spring 2025.

It’s a simple story, though its telling is worthy of a Dickens novel. To quote Wilkins Micawber in “David Copperfield,” “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

The annual Town Election will be held Tuesday, April 9, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., in the Bromfield School cafeteria. Residents will vote for five positions: Select Board, moderator, library trustee, School Committee, and Warner Free Lecture trustee. Additionally, there will be two questions on the ballot, one regarding a DPW building project, and the other regarding a budget override.

Readers who seek a one-page overview of the fiscal 2025 budget—and assurance that it balances—should turn to Harvard’s five-year budgeted revenue and expense projection, sometimes referred to as the “recap.”

Article 22 asks voters whether Harvard should designate an 8-acre overlay district on Ayer Road where multifamily homes could be built by right. To create the zone, a new bylaw must be passed by two-thirds vote.

Ever think about leaving the rusted-out 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme that your grandmother left you in the parking lot at the town beach after dark and walking away? Article 21 may make you think twice.

If residents want the same services that they have come to expect over the past year from their schools, police, fire, and other departments in fiscal 2025, they will need to approve a Proposition 2½ tax override at the ballot box April 9. Voters will have two choices.

If the questions asked and answers given at Tuesday night’s Proposition 2½ override information session are any indication, the town’s senior boards have work to do in educating voters about the financial decisions that await them a week from now at Town Meeting and Town Election.

At a Board of Health meeting on Feb. 26, Chair Sharon McCarthy said she was “outraged” that Town Administrator Tim Bragan changed the board’s budget request for six additional administrative assistant hours to an additional 16 hours. 

The 2023 drinking water quality report for the town’s public water supply was just released, and it shows no actionable items, although sodium has risen to its highest level in at least 15 years.

The Select Board voted unanimously Tuesday night to support every article on this year’s warrant, with the exception of Article 4, which asks for money to begin work on an update of the town’s Master Plan.

Despite protests from Select Board member Kara Minar, the board voted at its March 19 meeting not to hire a professional search firm to look for a replacement for Town Administrator Tim Bragan, who is set to retire July 1.

The Bromfield School is generally in compliance with the federal law that requires equity between girls’ and boys’ athletic programs, but there is room for improvement in many areas. That is the overall conclusion of the long-awaited Title IX review of Bromfield’s sports programs for grades 9-12. 

Electric Hydrogen, a Natick-based company with a major manufacturing facility at Devens, has secured a $46.3 million grant from the Department of Energy.