Sherman's Fiscal Failure

There are two ways to look at the spectacular collapse of the Sherman School and the resulting $50 million tax burden. The first is to assume the Lowe administration is simply oblivious—a group of well-meaning but fundamentally ill-equipped officials who were caught completely off-guard when the roof started leaking and the K-Wing began to rot.

The second, far more disturbing possibility, is that they knew exactly what they were doing.

In municipal governance, true intent is rarely found in press releases or hallway apologies. It is found in the ledger. When you hand the Town of Sherman’s operating budgets from 2013 to 2026 to a professional auditor, a chilling narrative emerges. The data reveals that the decay of the Sherman School was not an accident. It was the predictable, manufactured result of a highly specific fiscal strategy: Demolition by Neglect.

Here is what the math reveals about the intentional starving of Sherman’s most critical asset.

The Facilities Management Void

The most glaring anomaly in the town’s financial history is the complete elimination of the people responsible for keeping the buildings standing.

In the 2015/2016 budget, the town entirely defunded the $25,000 "Facilities Manager" line item. The position simply vanished. It did not reappear in any meaningful capacity until the 2021/2022 budget, and even then, it was tucked under the Emergency Services Facility (ESF) for a meager $5,076—explicitly not for general town or school maintenance. By the proposed 2025/2026 budget, this ESF management role is still only funded at $10,000.

For nearly ten years—the exact decade during which the school’s infrastructure actively decayed to the point of a $50 million crisis—the town budgeted essentially zero dollars for dedicated facility management leadership at the municipal level. It is no coincidence that the K-Wing was shuttered in 2015, the exact same year the Facilities Manager was defunded.

The Starvation of the School

While the buildings were left unmanaged, the Board of Education was placed on a financial starvation diet. During an inflationary decade where the costs of basic goods, services, and construction skyrocketed, the BOE budget was intentionally flatlined, and in some years, actively reduced:

It is mathematically impossible to maintain a large municipal building during an inflationary period with a shrinking budget. The administration was not simply "holding the line on taxes"; they were ensuring the school did not have the capital required to survive.

Paving Roads While the Roof Leaks

If the town was so broke that it had to cut facility managers and shrink the school budget, where was the money going? The budgets reveal a strategy focused entirely on optics over infrastructure.

While the school deteriorated, the administration consistently funded highly visible public works projects. Road maintenance was funded at consistently high levels, jumping from $295,596 in 2017 to a proposed $325,000 in 2025. The budget rationales explicitly state that these funds were used to pave roads and beach parking lots. The administration made a calculated choice: they prioritized the smooth paving of the beach parking lot, while actively ignoring the catastrophic failure of the roof over the town's children.

The February 11 Town Hall Interaction

When Sherman CT News pointed a camera at the site on February 11, documenting the tarp-covered roof, the administration's panic manifested physically. After a bizarre series of interactions with a State Trooper in my own driveway, we went to Town Hall to seek answers. First Selectman Don Lowe abruptly escalated a quiet conversation about municipal zoning into a hostile confrontation:

"And furthermore, I feel threatened by your presence here. You threatened people, you harassed people, you did harm. I feel threatened by your presence right now and I want you to leave or I will call the police."

Let’s pause and examine that specific accusation: threats, harassment, harm. At no point did any such actions take place. We were two residents standing calmly in a public building asking a standard zoning question. But "harm" is a highly calculated metric for a politician to invoke. When a municipal executive cannot defend their actions, they manufacture victimhood. By baselessly accusing a journalist of "harm," Lowe attempted to flip the script, desperately trying to reframe a demand for accountability as a personal attack.

As we exited Town Hall, I turned to my husband in disbelief. The real "harm" being done in Sherman is not a publisher asking questions. The real harm is a chief executive who weaponizes emergency dispatch, hides a $50 million ledger, and manufactures police threats out of thin air to avoid answering questions.

The Executive Reward

Perhaps the most revealing piece of data in the audit is how the chief executive was compensated while the town's infrastructure collapsed.

The Sherman Salary Surge: Executive Compensation vs. Standard Inflation

In a public appeal to voters, First Selectman Don Lowe attempted to frame his role as a personal financial sacrifice, claiming: "Believe me, I can make more money doing many other things than working 60 hours a week on a Sherman First Selectman salary – by the way, among the worst salaries of Town CEO's in the 169 Connecticut towns."

The public record, however, tells a different story. As illustrated in the chart above, the First Selectman’s compensation violently detached from the standard rate of inflation starting in 2018.

From 2015 to the proposed 2026 rate, the First Selectman’s salary increased by roughly 78%. While the school was starved of maintenance funds, the executive compensation was aggressively increased—shifting the financial burden directly onto the Sherman taxpayers.

The Hidden Ledger

We must recognize the devastating reality of this data. The town was not broke. The budgets confirm that from 2015 to 2025, the administration systematically moved half a million dollars annually out of the operating budget and hoarded it in a "Reserve for Capital Exp".

They had the liquidity to address the $9.7 million K-Wing repair plan identified in 2021. They had the money to fix the roof. Instead, they chose to hoard a $2.3 million surplus, let the building fail entirely, and then drop a massive, bonded $50 million megaproject squarely onto the backs of the taxpayers.

When you view the missing FOIA records and the weaponization of the state police through the lens of this financial audit, the administration's panic finally makes sense. They aren't just hiding the daily logs of a construction site. They are trying to hide a decade-long failure of leadership.