Brewster Overcharged By Nauset School District; Town Owed More Than $400K

BREWSTER – It’s always nice to get a check in the mail for a refund you didn’t expect because you’ve been overcharged in some fashion.

According to select board member Pete Dahl, Brewster is due such a check, for a fairly substantial amount, from the Nauset Regional Schools. More importantly, according to Robert Tobias of the finance committee, the school district’s finance director has agreed and readjusted the fiscal year 2027 budget to reflect a change in the assessing formula. Discussions on what to do about past over assessments will happen later this week.

Dahl, who is the select board liaison to the Nauset regional school committee, explained at the board’s meeting Monday that the discrepancy was due to a mistake made maybe 10 years ago. According to the school district intermunicipal agreement, the capital and debt assessments were to be calculated in a slightly different manner than the operating cost assessment. But at some point the formulas became the same for both. The difference was negligible until fiscal 2024, when the debt for the $131.8 million Nauset High School renovation began kicking in. Dahl said that over the past three years, Brewster has been overcharged by $391,162, with $173,911 of that coming in the current fiscal year, which ends at the end of the month.

Dahl was asking board members if they want to pay the last quarterly assessment at the overcharged rate or the amount they should be paying.

The overcharged rate was originally discovered by Tobias. All the assessments are based on enrollment, and Brewster currently supplies 43 percent of the students to the district. That figure was 48 percent when the new high school was approved in 2022 and it was 46.8 percent in fiscal 2024. Tobias discovered the fiscal 2027 assessment was too high and didn’t reflect the enrollment numbers of the preceding fiscal year, excluding choice and charter students as required by the intermunicipal agreement, and Bob Dutch, the Nauset finance director, agreed. The district was including choice and charter students as was done for the operating assessment when it shouldn’t have done so.

“They made adjustments and I found the same methodology was used in previous years and I put together a memo and sent it to the Nauset Regional School Committee,” Dahl said. 

As a result, Brewster was overcharged by $173,911 in the current fiscal year, $148,583 in fiscal 2025 and $68,668 in fiscal 2024. A little extra calculation by Dahl revealed Brewster’s over assessment for the past six years totaled around $416,000; the three prior years to the high school construction only added about $7,000 a year to the tab.

“This has happened a couple of times in other districts,” Dahl said. “I talked with the town counsel and there are a couple of solutions. The important thing to convey is that some towns paid more and others paid less.”

In this instance Dahl said Orleans has been slightly overcharged and Eastham and Wellfleet have paid much less than they should have.

“This is a mistake, an error, that happened 10 years ago, and the error was carried forward,” Dahl said. “To be resolved, probably towns would have to pay more.”

Right now Brewster will pay more. Although Town Manager Peter Lombardi spoke to town counsel and they agreed that under the agreement Brewster could pay their true assessment as the quarterly payment, the select board opted to pay the overassessed amount, which is already budgeted, rather than disrupt the district’s finances this June. Next year the town will pay the correct assessment and seek payment for the years of over assessment.