Tisbury voters won’t confront a Proposition 2 1/2 override vote this year after all.

A hidden spreadsheet entry contained $1.8 million in long-forgotten funds — more than enough to balance the town’s $40 million budget, finance director Jon Snyder told the Gazette this week.

After advising the select board last week that a $1.5 million override was unavoidable, Mr. Snyder said, he burrowed deeply into the budget, which he calculates using the Excel spreadsheet program. 

“I’ve been doing a lot of work to make sure that I have backup for all of the pieces of the budget, [and] I found the spreadsheet that I used to calculate the budget and the levy limit had a hidden row,” he said.

Mr. Snyder said he discovered the hidden $1.8 million entry when he checked his Excel spreadsheet against the database program used to track town department budgets.

“We had all the same values for the different departments, but my totals were different,” he said.

Perplexed, Mr. Snyder next went hunting for hidden rows in Excel, which offers a tool that can render data invisible without removing them from the spreadsheet’s totals.

  What he found was nearly $2 million that has been languishing in town coffers for close to a decade, he said.

“The row dated back quite a few years, to when the county had assessed us for [a post-retirement employee benefit] contribution, and that’s probably eight or 10 years,” Mr. Snyder told the Gazette.

When and why the entry was hidden in the first place, and how it made its invisible way into the 2025 budget, remains a mystery, he said.

“If we had that row, it was years and years ago,” Mr. Snyder said. “I try to avoid hiding things, because unless you remember that they’re there, they’re awfully hard to see.”.

“We’re just fortunate that our annual meeting had to be scheduled in late May, because this would have been a problem,” he told the Gazette.

Because the new Tisbury School gymnasium and meeting hall won’t be completed until later this year, Tisbury will again hold its annual town meeting at the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center at the regional high school in Oak Bluffs, which was not available for town use until May 28 due to planned student activities.

The 2025 budget — the first Mr. Snyder has prepared since longtime town accountant Suzanne Kennedy retired last year — has already been prone to surprises. Last week’s override scare came after Mr. Snyder found an erroneous $1.2 million entry left over from Ms. Kennedy’s 2024 budget, along with nearly $300,000 he’d missed in a departmental request on the upcoming annual town meeting warrant.

“I think all is well that ends well,” he said this week.

While searching for Ms. Kennedy’s replacement, Tisbury officials recently extended the contract for interim town accountant Edward Christofono through the end of the 2024 fiscal year, June 30.