# Whole Picture — Decisions Made

Last updated: August 29, 2026 — v4.21.1 release, data horizons, and Future enhancements navigation

Purpose: the durable source of truth for wording, story, layout, interaction, and boundary decisions Sherie and the Whole Picture reporting task have settled. Review this file before revising a current page or creating a release. Update it when a decision becomes final, changes, or is intentionally retired.

Status terms:

- **FINAL** — use this decision unless Sherie expressly changes it.
- **PRESERVE EXACTLY** — wording must remain verbatim.
- **CURRENT WORKING FINAL** — approved for the current package, but Sherie has said the larger idea may continue to improve.
- **BOUNDARY** — a reporting or authority limit that must remain visible.

## 1. Whole Picture method

- **FINAL — Scan first.** Most residents will skim for what they care about rather than read every page from top to bottom.
- **FINAL — Every word must earn page real estate.** Remove throat-clearing, repeated explanation, instructions that are visually obvious, and sentences that do not change understanding or action.
- **FINAL — Meaning becomes stronger when fewer words compete with it.** Put the important words in headings, short statements, bullets, numbers, or visuals.
- **FINAL — Use progressive disclosure.** Give the question and short answer first. Put numbers, sources, limits, and technical evidence behind optional drilldowns.
- **FINAL — Use conversational kitchen-table language.** Prefer words such as “Let’s” when natural. Avoid institutional or consultant language.
- **FINAL — Capitalization can carry meaning.** Important civic concepts such as Goals, Work, Money, Results, Budget, Choice, and Services may be capitalized where that helps a skimming reader notice the relationship.
- **FINAL — Make visual promises clickable.** Cards, navigation paths, workbook buttons, complete-view controls, and apparent drilldowns must be real links. Never style a noninteractive element as though it were clickable.
- **FINAL — Preserve useful material.** New approved pages replace their prior doorway pages; they do not discard the deeper reports, evidence, or unfinished work behind them.
- **FINAL — Navigation belongs where the reader needs a next step.** “Choose where to go next” belongs at the bottom when placing it earlier interrupts the page’s story.
- **FINAL — A doorway must lead somewhere deeper.** The home page and major topic pages may stay compact so residents can choose where to enter. Once a resident chooses a Special Report, do not make them pass through another thin summary before reaching the evidence.
- **FINAL — The click is evidence of interest.** Treat entry into a Special Report as a request for a fully developed story. Immediately repay the click with the controlling answer, numbers, charts, relationships, meaning, limitations, and the decisions or questions the evidence supports.
- **FINAL — Progressive disclosure does not mean progressive disappointment.** Use expandable detail inside a substantive report; do not remove the substantive report and leave only a chain of introductory cards.

## 2. Visual direction

- **FINAL — Palette:** clean navy, gray, cream, and white. Do not use burgundy.
- **FINAL — Density:** residents should see the hook and meaningful content without first scrolling through an oversized hero.
- **FINAL — Type scale:** the main headline should be strong but should not yell or consume most of the first screen.
- **FINAL — Small category headers:** slightly darker so they remain visible while scanning.
- **FINAL — Status colors:** do not use red/green. Current Library status uses blue for established/documented and gold for not documented/could help.
- **FINAL — Legal and copyright material:** present but small, gray, and unobtrusive.

## 3. Whole Picture home

- **FINAL — Civic Authority Note position:** at the very top of the page, before the principal opening statement.
- **FINAL — Civic Authority Note appearance:** small and formatted like the disclosure band, not like a competing hero. Do not include the analytical-working-draft disclosure inside this note.
- **FINAL — Opening:** `YOUR TOWN. YOUR CHOICES. YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.`
- **FINAL — Supporting statement:** `You are not just affected by local government. You are part of how it governs.`
- **FINAL — Civic question:** `So what would make it easier for residents to show up informed, ask better questions, speak up, and vote?`
- **FINAL — Three-part explanation:** The Barrier; The Connection; What It Makes Possible.
- **FINAL — Remove unnecessary instructions:** do not say “Choose a question. Get the short answer first. Open the numbers…” The short form is `Choose a question. Get the answer.` when an instruction is needed.
- **FINAL — Remove:** `You do not need to understand Town government to begin.`
- **FINAL — The four main resident questions:**
  - My Household — `Why did my Tax Bill change?`
  - Town Money — `What’s already in the Budget?`
  - Growth & Place — `What could Wilbraham gain—or lose?`
  - The Next Choice — `How can we make complex Choices?`
- **CURRENT WORKING FINAL — CivicSS relationship:** Goals, Work, Money, and Results must be shown visually as a connected path, not explained in a paragraph. The ultimate few-word CivicSS “Aha” is still open for improvement.

## 4. Shared Goals–Work–Money–Results navigation

- **FINAL — Use these exact questions consistently on every current page:**
  - Goals — `What are we trying to achieve?`
  - Work — `What are we paying for?`
  - Money — `What’s already in the Budget?`
  - Results — `What did we accomplish?`
- **FINAL — All four destinations must be clickable.**
- **FINAL — Do not reintroduce:** `Follow the connection. The headings are the story. Open only the part you need.` The visual path should do that work.
- **FINAL — Do not use different descriptions for the same four destinations on different pages.**

## 5. Town Money / Budget baseline

- **FINAL — Main question:** `What’s already in the Budget?`
- **FINAL — Supporting section:** `What does the Budget already include?`
- **RETIRED — Do not use as a section heading:** `What are we already carrying?`
- **FINAL — Main explanation:** the Budget is already carrying Schools, Town Services, people, contracts, maintenance, Debt, and existing commitments. Before adding a Choice, show what must continue and what can actually change.
- **FINAL — Distinguish scopes:** the approximately $57.018M FY2027 General Fund Budget and approximately $66.372M expenditure-ledger total are different scopes. Explain the additional funds and do not add overlapping scopes.
- **FINAL — Budget evidence:** show entity, fund/scope, fiscal year, stage, unit, source, and relationship for every number.
- **FINAL — Service claims:** do not promise that the account ledger proves what every line “provides.” Say what the available evidence can establish.
- **FINAL — Detailed Budget evidence:** include department, fund, and expense-code reporting plus the analytical grouping/category method, with its status and limitations visible.
- **BOUNDARY — Missing is not zero; Budget authority is not actual spending; adjusted Budget, actuals, unexpended balance, and timing must not be blended.**

## 6. Household / Tax Bill

- **FINAL — Main question:** `Why did my Tax Bill change?`
- **FINAL — Every displayed household or townwide number needs a timeframe, label, and visible source.**
- **FINAL — Label the $6,880 → $8,186 sequence as the DLS-reported average single-family Tax Bill and identify its fiscal years.
- **FINAL — Tell the assessment story.** Assessment growth over the recent multi-year period is a major part of resident understanding, alongside levy, tax rate, and Budget changes.
- **FINAL — Preserve the deeper prior resident-financial reporting.** Do not replace carefully developed DLS distribution, assessment-band, levy, and household-effect work with a shallow summary.
- **FINAL — Avoid duplicate top boxes that both tell the same single-house Tax Bill story.**
- **FINAL — “Show the whole household effect” must teach a clear relationship, not merely open a decorative blue area.**

## 7. Growth & Place

- **FINAL — Main question:** `What could Wilbraham gain—or lose?`
- **FINAL — Frame choices fairly:** name possible gains as well as losses.
- **FINAL — Use Balanced Scorecard page 3 to explain what Wilbraham values and therefore might gain, change, or lose.
- **FINAL — Preserve commercial detail.** Ask who benefits, who carries the burden, and where effects will be felt—including cases where public land or spending may support private commercial benefit.
- **FINAL — Include:** `What could Wilbraham change later—and what might be impossible to recreate?`
- **FINAL — Why it matters:** `The goal is not to produce one person’s version of Wilbraham. The goal is to help Wilbraham recognize itself.`
- **FINAL — Avoid accusatory phrasing.** Do not write “and still take local identity seriously” in a way that sounds like an accusation. Explain positively how place-based evidence informs a townwide choice.
- **FINAL — Remove Sherie’s name from the resident-facing page except where legally or evidentially required by the disclosure/source context.**

## 8. Complex Choices / Scenario method

- **FINAL — The Scenario process is the core capability.** BUC and Middle School are examples, not the definition of the method.
- **FINAL — Opening sequence:**
  - `We don’t know yet.`
  - `The questions are ready. The final Choice may not be.`
  - The model shows what is established, what is not, why, and what evidence could change the answer.
- **FINAL — Important conclusion:** “We don’t know yet” can be a valuable and responsible result.
- **FINAL — Assumptions:** describe the future being tested and make assumptions visible and configurable. An assumption is not simply “what must be true.”
- **FINAL — Scenario discipline:** show assumptions, hidden and complete costs, legal and regulatory constraints, operational feasibility, service effects, financial feasibility, dependencies, readiness, decision authority, reversibility, and both avoidable and unavoidable risks.
- **FINAL — Civic choice after feasibility work:** once legal, regulatory, operational, and financial analysis removes false choices and exposes risks, residents weigh the remaining feasible choices by cost, identity, values, service, control, what is preserved or given up, and future flexibility.
- **PRESERVE EXACTLY — Why CivicSS page:** `Public information is not the same as public understanding. Public understanding is not the same as decision readiness.` These words are intentionally preserved on the linked Why CivicSS page; they were intentionally removed from the Scenario opening so that page can begin with its conclusion.
- **PRESERVE EXACTLY — Why CivicSS page:** `Transparency opens the door. Decision infrastructure makes the path walkable.`
- **PRESERVE EXACTLY — Why CivicSS page:** `Why is it so difficult for communities to make well-informed decisions when so much information already exists?`
- **FINAL — BUC example:** replace “protect services” with `Identify services, usability constraints, and utilization efficiency.`
- **FINAL — Middle School boundary:** do not claim due diligence is ready. Show separately what is established, partly established, missing, and dependent on further evidence.
- **FINAL — Scenario page presentation:** use clear bullets where a flowchart compresses or distorts the necessary explanation.

## 9. Goals

- **FINAL — Resident question inside the page:** `What do we want to invest in?`
- **FINAL — Evidence basis:** use the Balanced Scorecard mission/objectives and the actual Town work portfolio to infer and organize civic purposes. Clearly label missions, objectives, Portfolio/Program groupings, and Run-versus-Change classifications as CivicSS analysis.
- **BOUNDARY — Do not criticize Town Hall or mention the Select Board’s thin goal list on the resident page.**
- **FINAL — Do not present implied CivicSS goals as officially adopted Town goals.**
- **FINAL — Library example:** the Library is the clearest structured example of mission, objectives, actions, and measures. Make its example clickable and explain that it demonstrates how alignment might be represented.
- **FINAL — Avoid overlap:** “What is missing?” must not repeat the Goals → Work → Money → Results explanation.
- **FINAL — Apply the word/real-estate test to “What remains to be built.”**

## 10. Work

- **FINAL — Main question:** `What are we paying for?`
- **FINAL — Opening language:** `Let’s see` rather than `Now see.`
- **FINAL — Work definition:** Services, responsibilities, decisions, studies, improvements, and projects competing for Money, people, and time.
- **FINAL — Two kinds of Work:** Run the Town and Change / Improve. Both compete for capacity.
- **FINAL — Eight Portfolios are categories of the whole body of Work.** They are not “eight ways to see the Work.”
- **FINAL — Each Portfolio contains Programs; each Program groups related Services, responsibilities, decisions, studies, improvements, and projects.
- **BOUNDARY — The Work is the Town’s. Portfolio, Program, and Run/Change organization is CivicSS analysis derived from that Work.
- **FINAL — Do not say `Visibility is not yet full management.`** “Yet” promises a future state CivicSS has no authority to promise. State specifically what the evidence can and cannot show.
- **FINAL — Complete view:** the workbook control must be visibly labeled and directly clickable: `Open the Town Work organized by Portfolio and Program.`
- **FINAL — Workbook caution:** a listed item is not automatically authorized, funded, active, complete, or proven effective.

## 11. Results and Library example

- **FINAL — Main question:** `What did we accomplish?`
- **FINAL — Use “What is the outcome?” or “What did we accomplish?” rather than the vague `Did it work?`
- **FINAL — Recognize the Library.** It is the strongest current departmental example of a structured mission, actions, and measures and should receive clear credit for that work.
- **FINAL — The page should help the Library Director tell why the Library’s work matters and what further evidence could strengthen the case for investment or expansion.
- **FINAL — Be exact about what exists and what is absent.** Do not describe an “approved Library service response” without naming the approving body, document, and date.
- **FINAL — Current documented status:** the Wilbraham Public Library Board of Trustees approved the FY2026–FY2029 strategy on June 25, 2024.
- **FINAL — Explain what could help next:** connect service delivery and measures to resident outcomes, establish baselines and targets where appropriate, and show how added capacity or investment would change reach, access, use, or outcomes.
- **FINAL — Put “what is still needed” beside the clickable Library alignment example, not far away or only in technical prose.
- **FINAL — Use blue/gold status treatment:** blue for established/documented; gold for not documented/could help. Do not imply failure merely because an additional analytical connection could help.

## 12. Data, disclosure, and authority

- **PRESERVE EXACTLY:** `CivicSS analytical working draft—not an official Town or Finance Committee report. Prepared from the identified public and supplied sources for discussion and review. Source data has not been independently audited or certified by Sherie Schaefer. Do not use for an official presentation until the supporting data has completed Town and Finance Committee review.`
- **BOUNDARY — Official Town sources and CivicSS analytical interpretation must remain visibly distinct.**
- **BOUNDARY — Every number requires entity, period, fund/scope, stage, unit, evidence basis, and relationship to other numbers.**
- **BOUNDARY — Missing is not zero. An estimate is not an actual. Do not add overlapping scopes.**
- **BOUNDARY — Scenarios present feasible paths and consequences without premature recommendation. Include delay/no-action where relevant.**
- **BOUNDARY — Loaded data is not automatically report-authoritative. Use Master-Control-accepted reporting views and query contracts for authoritative refreshes.**

## 13. Release and preservation decisions

- **FINAL — Current sealed local release:** v4.21.1 is the complete local review package; v4.12.0 remains the principal accepted evidence baseline, supplemented only by named accepted contracts and the dated read-only snapshot documented in the release.
- **FINAL — Approved pages replace the corresponding prior doorway pages only.** All other current detailed pages and unfinished work remain in the complete package.
- **FINAL — Prior versioned releases are immutable.**
- **FINAL — A complete review package and a Cloudflare deployment package are different artifacts.** Do not create or deploy a Cloudflare package unless Sherie asks.
- **FINAL — Validate every visible control, page route, local link, number frame, source, accessibility behavior, and package checksum before delivery.**

## 14. Affordability kickoff

- **FINAL — Current placement:** Affordability enters Whole Picture as two linked drilldowns beneath Town Money: the concise kickoff from component v0.2.4 and the complete one-page decision path from component v0.3.0.
- **FINAL — Preserve the supplied page content substantially as-is.** Current editorial review is limited to confirming the required disclaimer and ensuring safe app integration, working assets, and navigation.
- **FINAL — Required state:** `historical_only=true` and `publishable=false` remain visible.
- **BOUNDARY — FY2026 historical certified tax-setting evidence is not current capacity, available cash, a spending Budget, a household estimate, or proof of affordability.**
- **BOUNDARY — FY2026 levy, FY2026 tax-setting revenue basis, FY2027 final-voted General Fund authority, and FY2027 all-Funds adjusted Expense Control answer different questions and must not be added or substituted for one another.**
- **FINAL — Baseline Money page bridge:** show `$57.018M General Fund + $9.354M Other Funds = $66.372M all-Funds ledger`, with FY2027 scope, stage, source, and non-equivalence visible.

## 15. Special Reports

- **FINAL — Organize Special Reports by resident-readable categories.** The catalog should help readers find the kind of question they care about without requiring them to know a system, source, department, or dataset name.
- **FINAL — Category pages may be scan-first directories.** Their purpose is discovery and comparison among reports.
- **FINAL — Individual Special Reports are destination pages.** They should contain the complete developed story appropriate to the subject, even when that story is longer.
- **FINAL — First conversion step for preserved reports:** remove the oversized legacy headline treatment before revising anything else. The report title must orient the reader without consuming the screen or delaying the answer and controlling evidence.
- **FINAL — Preserve the strongest prior reporting.** Numbers, equations, charts, tables, downloads, source trails, limitations, and important explanations should be reorganized—not replaced by a shallow summary.
- **FINAL — Put technical evidence behind the story, not instead of it.** Residents should encounter the meaning first, then be able to inspect the complete evidence without leaving the report.
- **FINAL — State Aid application:** restore the FY2027 Wilbraham and HWRSD equations, line items, recent comparison, long-run chart, questions enabled by the data, source controls, downloads, and boundaries. Keep the two entities and their funding relationships separate.
- **FINAL — Cherry Sheet belongs inside the State Aid story.** Explain the Cherry Sheet as the source mechanism for estimated receipts and charges; do not require residents to understand its name before they can understand what State Aid changes.
- **FINAL — State Aid controlling meaning:** State Aid helps carry the cost of Services. When it does not keep pace, more of the difference must be carried locally through property taxes, other Town income, reduced Services, deferred Work, or another Choice.
- **BOUNDARY — Do not double count District support.** HWRSD State Aid supports the District before Wilbraham’s member assessment is calculated. Do not subtract it again from Wilbraham’s assessment.

## 16. Maintenance rule

At the end of a substantial review session—or immediately after a final wording, interaction, evidence, or boundary decision—update this file. Before building a release, compare each current doorway page against this file and record any intentional exception. Never let an older draft silently override a decision listed here.

## 17. Clickability, expansion, and flow — 2026-08-27

- **FINAL — Small navy arrow in the top-right corner means the entire card opens another page.**
- **FINAL — Heavy gold arrow between boxes means the story flows in that direction.** It is not a separate control.
- **FINAL — Plus/minus means content expands or closes on the current page.**
- **FINAL — Flat boxes without an action cue are information only.** Do not give them hover movement, button styling, corner arrows, or shadows that suggest a click.
- **FINAL — Do not use the same arrow treatment for navigation and flow.** They must differ visibly in size, weight, placement, and color intensity.
- **FINAL — Make the whole destination card clickable** and preserve visible keyboard focus, reasonable touch targets, and a restrained hover response.
- **FINAL — Ordinary text links remain visibly underlined.** Residents should never have to click around to discover navigation.
## Debt and early-warning Special Reports — 2026-08-26

- Treat **Debt** as one subject with two linked, fully developed resident reports—not two disconnected catalog entries and not one overloaded report.
- Lead with **What debt payments are already on the calendar?** This is the concrete schedule story: how much, which entity, which fiscal year, principal, interest, endpoints, and the visible FY2033 Town step-down. Preserve the annual comparison chart, full schedule table, downloadable data, entity boundary, and the warning that debt rolling off is not automatically new capacity.
- Follow with **What do the debt and disclosure records really tell us?** This is the evidence-meaning story: authorization, issuance, outstanding principal, annual debt service, exclusions, notes, refundings, Town versus HWRSD, long-term obligations, and what the records do not prove. It must translate the useful numerical stories from the preserved technical appendix without making residents enter through a 42,000-word wall.
- Cross-link the two reports with plain labels: **See the payment calendar** and **Understand what the records prove**. Do not repeat the same debt introduction in both.
- Keep **What warning signs were visible before the next budget arrived?** as a separate, fully developed Budget/Decision Process story. Preserve the $1.265 million pressure stack, scale comparisons, HWRSD acceleration calculation, one-time-money lesson, whole-project gate, reconciliation exceptions, and forecast-to-actual controls.
- Numerical Special Reports are destinations. Long is acceptable when each section teaches something useful. Preserve charts, calculations, tables, downloads, source frames, and limitations; do not reduce the preserved report to a thin doorway.
- On every old report conversion, reduce the legacy oversized headline before other presentation work.
- Maintain `PRESERVED-CONTENT-REFLECTION-AND-RETIREMENT-REGISTER.md`. A new page may label a preserved artifact **COMPLETELY REFLECTED—READY FOR SHERIE’S REVIEW**, **PARTIALLY REFLECTED—RETAIN**, or **NOT YET ASSESSED**. “Completely reflected” is not deletion authority. Only Sherie may approve removal of an exact preserved artifact after review.
- Reflection means the material story, data, calculations, tables, charts, sources, limitations, relationships, and decision meaning are present in current Whole Picture reporting. Large mixed artifacts are assessed section by section; one completed section never retires the whole source.
- Numerical reporting should vary the visual form to match the relationship: tables for exact lookup, bars for magnitude, lines for change over time, stacked or pie-style views for meaningful composition, flows for sequence, and compact comparison cards for distinct choices. Do not force a chart where it adds no meaning, but do not reduce a useful numerical story to prose when it can be understood at a glance.
- Cloudflare packages should exclude prior immutable release archives and unneeded duplicate working-draft copies. Governed local release history remains preserved. Public routes must be redirected to the surviving current file before a duplicate path is omitted.

## Deep Special Report migration — 2026-08-26

- **FINAL — Deep rebuild means full content migration, not a presentation pass.** Every preserved link and drilldown must be reviewed, and every material story, number, calculation, table, chart, source, limitation, relationship, and decision lesson must be present at the current top-level report layer.
- **FINAL — A topic mention is not content equivalence.** A preserved artifact may be marked completely reflected only when exact text-and-structure checks and human story review support that conclusion.
- **FINAL — Current resident pages must not send readers back to old evidence HTML for the real answer.** Raw evidence may remain linked; old user-facing report pages do not remain resident doorways.
- **FINAL — The resident Special Report library contains 38 catalog routes.** Debt Records belongs visibly beside Debt Calendar under Choices and Affordability.
- **FINAL — Historical Evidence and Technical indexes are not resident report categories.** Complete current evidence remains attached to the relevant report, while immutable local history remains outside the Cloudflare deployment.
- **FINAL — v4.17.0 is the deep Special Report release candidate.** Its Cloudflare package must remain below 1,000 files and exclude immutable prior-release trees, superseded page copies, old user-facing evidence HTML, and unneeded build/source bulk.
- **BOUNDARY — Deployment trimming does not delete governed local history.** Sherie retains removal authority after reviewing the decommission-candidate register.

## Resident Brief incubation ownership transfer — 2026-08-29

- **FINAL — Incubation is complete.** CDX Partner accepted exact release `CivicSS-Resident-Briefs-v0.4.0-20260829`, and `CDX Rpt Web | Resident Briefs` returned `RESIDENT_BRIEF_OWNERSHIP_ACCEPTED`. Partner acknowledged the return; ownership transfer is complete.
- **FINAL — Whole Picture no longer owns Resident Brief incubation.** Whole Picture retains only its own broad connected-reporting product. It may provide specialist content or reusable components to Resident Briefs only through governed upstream handoffs.
- **PRESERVE EXACTLY — Resident Brief releases v0.3.0 and v0.4.0 are immutable lineage.** Do not alter, replace, or repurpose either release.
- **BOUNDARY — No deployment or publication was authorized by the ownership transfer.** The transfer did not authorize database, Git, loader, UAT, Master Control, Cloudflare, or other external-state changes.

## Internal Future enhancements navigation — 2026-08-29

- **FINAL — Give Sherie an at-a-glance remaining-work path.** Whole Picture versions place a very small, visually quiet **Future enhancements** link at the far right of the first-page ribbon.
- **FINAL — The link opens the concise enhancement view.** `WHOLE-PICTURE-FUTURE-ENHANCEMENTS.md` is the durable list; the linked HTML page is its scan-first presentation.
- **BOUNDARY — This is product-development navigation, not a Town plan or promise.** Do not include it in a public or Cloudflare package unless Sherie expressly authorizes inclusion.
- **AUTHORIZED EXCEPTION — v4.21.1 Cloudflare package.** Sherie expressly asked Whole Picture to add this link to the app and then create the Cloudflare-copy release; include the page and its controlling snapshot records in this package.
- **FINAL — Maintain, do not accumulate.** Update the durable list when Sherie adds, completes, changes, or retires material work. Keep detailed defects, decisions, and preservation state in their controlling registers rather than duplicating them into the page.

## Source inventory and data horizons — 2026-08-29

- **FINAL — Reconcile the reporting inventory after loader activity.** Every Whole Picture read-only refresh records the latest visible migration and controlled populations for important source families. A changed population or new relation triggers review; it does not automatically promote the data into resident reporting.
- **FINAL — Distinguish four source states:** not loaded; loaded but not accepted for reporting; accepted with a bounded contract; and adopted into a named report surface.
- **FINAL — Every numerical story carries its own data horizon.** Show the fact period and evidence stage beside the number, and disclose when the evidence collection was last checked or captured when that helps the reader understand staleness.
- **FINAL — “As of” never makes an older fact current.** Use it for a true balance/effective date or the latest evidence used—not as a substitute for the fiscal year, school year, event/report year, or source period.
- **FINAL — Source gaps may change after a loader run.** Confirm the live accepted-data inventory before describing a public source as missing. Database presence alone remains insufficient for report-authoritative use.
- **BOUNDARY — FY2026 DLS Schedule A-derived General Fund expenditure and revenue files contain literal zeros across all displayed series.** Retain the source observations, label the condition, and use FY2025 as the latest useful nonzero completed-year endpoint until a later accepted source resolves it. Missing or unusable evidence is not zero activity.
- **BOUNDARY — ATR paving 0457 is historical 2009–2018 evidence only.** It does not establish current condition, current completion, cost, canonical road identity, capital linkage, priority, readiness, or overall completion.
- **CURRENT VERIFIED GAP — A governed MassDOT/MassGIS road inventory relation was not present at the August 29, 2026 review.** Continue to treat it as a loader opportunity until an accepted contract appears.