School Board Chair Dismisses Default Budget Concerns

By Thomas P. Caldwell

BRISTOL — School Board Chair Jeff Levesque of Groton says there’s no problem with the Newfound Area School District’s default budget, and he won’t call a special meeting to address Archie Auger’s concerns.

Auger, a former school administrator who lives in Bristol, maintains it is illegal to place $712,300 in new spending for capital improvements in the default budget, which takes effect if voters turn down the budget article when they cast their ballots on March 13.

“The school board included those items in the proposed operating budget, which is no problem,” Auger said, “but to also include them in the default budget, when the capital improvement plan has never been brought before the voters, is a serious problem.”

The Newfound Area School Board adopted the capital improvement plan developed by its facilities committee last May, and Levesque said the school district attorney has said that inclusion of capital improvement items in the default budget is proper.

School board member Vincent Paul Migliore of Bridgewater, who is a former chair of that board, said he favors holding a special meeting to discuss Auger’s complaint.

“I’m not sure we did anything wrong,” Migliore said, “but we have a fiduciary responsibility to make as members of the School Board, and if we have new information that could alter the default budget, RSA 40:13-XI(b) provides a way to adjust it by completing an amended default budget form.”

He added, “When we learned of the problem, we had three weeks to deal with it before the [vote], but time is running out.”

Levesque said the subject is on the board’s March 12 meeting agenda, one day before the ballot vote.

“There absolutely will not be a special meeting during vacation week, as many of those with an interest are unavailable,” he said. “If any new information comes forward that indicates the public record on the subject is flawed, there could be a special meeting the following week, between vacation and the regular board meeting, if recommended by the attorney.”

Last week, Hillsborough County Superior Court ruled in a similar challenge that, because Weare voters had never agreed to spend the $60,000 that officials had placed in that town’s default budget, the money had to be removed.

Migliore, who as a state representative sits on the House Municipal and County Government Committee, said there are several bills this session dealing with default budgets because of complaints about the difficulty of interpreting the language in the statute.

The current definition of the default budget says it is the same amount as contained in the previous year’s operating budget, increased by debt service, contracts, and other obligations previously incurred or mandated by law, and reduced by one-time expenditures contained in the operating budget.

House Bill 1307, as proposed, would amend the definition to stipulate that it also would be reduced by any other reductions in the proposed operating budget.

HB 1396 would allow the governing body to increase the default budget by qualifying capital expenditures, providing it is certified by a third party as being “a non-deferrable issue of safety, code compliance, or protection against property loss.”

HB 1652 would require a town or school district to provide greater detail about how the default budget was calculated, including the amounts excluded as being one-time expenditures from the previous year. It would remove a provision of the current law that allows a community to hold one special meeting to revise a budget.

The state Senate also has a bill, SB 342, that would require written documentation of the specific cost items that constitute an increase or decrease in the default budget.

The bill that would allow limited capital expenditures would provide a way for towns or school districts to deal with pressing issues without opening up the default budget to other unapproved capital items.

Traditionally, capital improvement plans lay out a course of spending to address anticipated needs in a way that evens out the tax impact year to year, and the plan serves as guide for annual appropriations. Individual capital improvement projects typically go before the voters for approval as they come up in the plan, but are not automatically added to the budget.

Auger pointed out that the school board approved its capital improvement plan after last year’s District Meeting, so residents never had a chance to vote on the plan. Under the Municipal Budget Law, adoption of a capital improvement plan requires a ⅗ affirmative vote in an Official Ballot community.

If it had been approved, the School Board might have justification for putting the cost items in the default budget, he said.

As it stands, if school district residents vote down the proposed budget, they still would be facing that cost in the default budget, Auger said.

The Budget Committee is supporting a $23,813,595 operating budget which, if defeated, would result in a $23,535,833 default budget. Without the new capital items, the default budget would drop to $22,823,533, just slightly more than the current-year budget of $22,000,656.

27 February 2018