About Clarkstown Bonds

An authorization is permission to borrow. It is not money spent, and not money raised. When the Town Board authorises a bond it is voting to allow the town to borrow up to that amount for a stated purpose. Whether the bonds are then issued, when, and at what interest rate are separate decisions made later — so a total on this site is the size of the permission the board has granted, which is a different figure from the town’s debt.

Where the numbers come from. The Town publishes minutes of its Town Board meetings to its own public portal. Those minutes are collected and reviewed on Rockland Minutes, where each meeting’s list of authorised bonds is read out of the minutes and then checked by a person before it is approved. Nothing appears here until that has happened, and every amount on this site traces back to a specific meeting — each date in the tables opens the meeting it came from.

This is a floor, not a complete census. The totals cover the meetings that have been reviewed so far, and only those. Meetings still waiting to be read are simply absent rather than estimated, so the real figure for any period can only be higher than what is shown, never lower. The number of meetings behind the arithmetic is printed at the top of the front page for exactly this reason.

Refunding resolutions are excluded. A refunding bond refinances debt the town already owes — it replaces an old borrowing rather than adding a new one. Counting those alongside new authorizations would overstate what the board has committed the town to, sometimes substantially, so they are left out of every total here.

The cost estimates are yours, not the town’s. The town has not published an interest rate or a term for these authorizations, because an authorization is not a completed sale. So this site never asserts one. The interest figures on the front page move with a rate and a term that you choose, and they are arithmetic on your assumptions — useful for scale, not a forecast of what the town will pay.

The groupings are a reading aid. Bonds are sorted into categories — roads, buildings, vehicles and so on — by the wording of each resolution, automatically. It is a way into the list, not an official classification, and it is not what the town calls them. Anything the wording does not settle is left uncategorized rather than pushed into the nearest bucket.

The official minutes are the record. If anything here and the Town’s own minutes ever disagree, the minutes are correct. Accuracy about public money is the whole point of the site, so a figure that looks wrong is worth reporting — it will be checked against the source document and fixed.