BRISTOL — The future direction of the Newfound Area School District hinges on two petitioned warrant articles that voters will be discussing at the Feb. 2 deliberative session and voting on in March. One would give residents a chance to vote separately on large capital expenditures; the other would place responsibility for calculating the default budget — the one that would take effect if voters reject the proposed budget — in the hands of the budget committee, rather than the school board.
The decision is important because, if the articles do not pass, the Newfound Area School Board will have established a new path forward in meeting the challenge of declining student enrollment, reduced state aid, and a 2 percent tax cap that limits the impact of school spending on taxpayers.
Having exhausted most of the traditional means of holding the line on budgets — reducing expenditures, renegotiating contracts, and seeking bulk purchasing agreements — administrators hit upon an innovative solution that allows them to act independently of the voters. A provision of the official ballot act, RSA 40:13, allows the school board to define what constitutes a one-time expenditure. They decided to exploit that language to redefine “one-time expenditure.”
When voters broke the tax cap two years ago to appropriate funds for the replacement of the high school roof, it increased the baseline figure for calculating the tax cap by nearly a million dollars. That figure coincided with what the district’s facilities committee was coming up with for a recommended spending level to catch up on building maintenance. The resulting capital improvement plan has the district spending nearly a million dollars a year for 10 years.
Last year, the school board included the capital improvement items on the plan not only in the proposed budget, but also in the default budget, arguing that the high school roof was part of ongoing facilities maintenance included in the CIP plan. When voters rejected the proposed budget, the CIP projects still got funded through the default budget.
After the deliberative session, but prior to the vote, Bristol resident and former school administrator Archie Auger realized that they had redefined what constituted a one-time expenditure as it applies to the default budget and asked for a special meeting to address his concerns about the legality of the move. When the school board put off the discussion until after the vote and for several more months, a number of voters from the seven towns comprising the school district came out to complain, leading to a contentious year in which Superintendent Stacy Buckley at one point called in local police because of concerns that the meeting would turn violent.
The school district attorney supported the school board’s position, saying they would likely prevail in a court challenge because of the way the statute is worded.
No court challenge materialized, allowing the school board to set its new precedent for handling spending.
The Advantages
The Newfound Area School District has long had a tough time getting the residents of all seven towns to support building projects. In order to do a project in one town, it often became necessary to include renovations to the schools in each town to gain approval. Doing it that way, however, increased the overall cost of those projects, and through the years, building maintenance and improvements often got delayed or ignored.
Once the district approved a tax cap, it became even more difficult to keep up with the building maintenance. Under a tax cap, any spending below what is allowed can never be made up again without a vote to override the cap in a subsequent year — a rare occurrence.
By the time the school board formed its current facilities committee, not only had the buildings fallen into disrepair to the extent that safety issues were emerging, but school enrollment had started to drop, leading to questions about whether it made sense to maintain so many buildings. Yet when the school board attempted to address excess space by suggesting consolidation, parents were outraged at the thought, and the effort was dropped.
The establishment of a capital improvement program allowed the district to lay out a plan to address the largest of the facilities needs and to plot the expenditures over a period of years. Not only does the plan even out the spending, it also allows each town to see when it would benefit from the spending. This year, for instance, the district did parking lot reconstruction at Danbury Elementary School and New Hampton Community School and replaced the high school track, while Newfound Road reconstruction and window replacement at the middle school in Bristol are on the plan for the coming year.
CIP plans serve as a road map for spending, but the projects identified do not always get funded in the year they are proposed, forcing an adjustment to the spending plan. The Newfound Area School Board got around that problem with its broad definition of “one-time expenditure” and by including that spending in its general operating budget, rather than breaking out those costs in separate warrant articles where there is a better chance of them getting defeated.
When residents voiced their opposition to the way the school board was handling spending, Bridgewater member Vincent Paul Migliore suggested that they could appease people and avoid a backlash at the next deliberative session by establishing a policy that would give residents a chance to vote on CIP projects in separate warrant articles. Other board members disagreed, with some going as far as to say they should not pay attention to the ballot vote because there are many other residents in the district who do not cast ballots — people who might favor those projects.
As a result, Migliore started the petition to ask the school board to place capital improvement projects (defined as exceeding $24,999) on the warrant as separate articles — a move that School Board Chair Jeff Levesque of Groton termed “a temper tantrum.”
The Opposition
Because the school board’s solution makes it more difficult for residents to control the budget or eliminates their ability to say no to spending, the predicted backlash materialized in a sufficient number of signatures for Migliore’s petition to appear on the warrant, and for another one, by Bristol Selectman Don Milbrand, to suggest transferring the responsibility for the calculation of the default budget to the Newfound Area School District Budget Committee.
Milbrand’s reasoning is simple: The school board’s definition of “one-time expenditure” runs against the common understanding of what constitutes a one-time cost, and giving that responsibility to the budget committee will restore the common definition.
Default budgets have been criticized since the original Official Ballot Act was passed as Senate Bill 2. Attempts by the New Hampshire State Legislature to clarify the law have generated new problems, including last year’s amendments that allow the inclusion of some contractual obligations but eliminate others. For instance, although the default budget can include increases for health insurance premiums, it cannot include increases built into contracts for transportation, software licensing fees, and utility increases.
The disputes over how a default budget is calculated may remain if a different body takes over the calculation, but Milbrand said it is time to give it a try.
Passage of the two petitioned articles would be a reprimand to the school board and would restore the traditional democratic process.
It will be up to the voters to decide if it is time to give up some rights in order to see the progress that administrators are seeking, or to rein in their elected officials and remind them who they are serving.
