Delegation chair: One meeting is enough to approve budget

LACONIA — Five members of the Belknap County Delegation are urging Chair Harry Bean (R–Gilford) to schedule additional meetings for all representatives to weigh recommendations for the county budget.

“All delegation meetings in the past regarding the budget have taken two to four meetings, once the budget review had been completed,” a Tuesday letter to the editor in The Daily Sun read. The letter was signed by Rep. Barbara Comtois (R–Barnstead), Rep. Paul Terry (R–Alton), Rep. Tom Ploszaj (R–Center Harbor), Rep. Nikki McCarter (R–Belmont) and Rep. Peter Varney (R–Alton).  

Given that the proposed budget — to which, they wrote, the budget committee’s recommendations are slight — involves a spending increase and a corresponding tax increase, representatives should be granted more than one meeting to ask questions and debate changes, letter writers asserted. 

Bean said he has no intention of calling additional meetings. 

“If I thought they wanted more meetings to be productive, I would do it,” he said in an interview. “I think they want more meetings to be counterproductive, so consequently, I won’t.

“There are people on the delegation who are trying to be difficult,” Bean said. He felt those asking for more meetings did not do so with genuine or cooperative intentions. “I don’t think they’re really trying to help.” 

With the exception of Varney — who does not regularly attend delegation meetings, and was last present in April 2022 — the group often votes against the measures favored by the chair and his supporters, and the letter became the latest point at which debates about the budget review process aligned with factional tensions on the county body.

Once county commissioners draw up a proposed budget and present it to the delegation, as they did in December, the delegation has until April 1 to pass its own version. The commissioners’ proposed budget will otherwise, at that time, go into effect.

The commissioners’ proposed budget includes a 6.6% increase in spending, or about $2 million, about half of which is tied to commitments the delegation has already made. Because of declining county revenue and because past delegations had artificially and unsustainably deflated tax rates by using the county fund balance to support the budget — depleting that emergency fund by more than 50% over the last two years — that 6.6% spending increase would draw a 35% increase in the county tax rate. Such an increase would add $124 to the tax bill of someone with a $300,000 home, according to the commissioners’ presentation.

The tax increase, the group wrote in the letter, would be the likely consequence of the delegation being short on time for budget deliberations.

The delegation appointed a seven-member budget subcommittee in mid-January who reviewed that proposed budget department by department and made recommended modifications. The committee was originally scheduled to present its recommendations at a March 6 delegation meeting, but the matter was tabled after Comtois noted that the committee had not properly noticed its budget review meetings. 

Figures in county politics have accused the subcommittee of lacking transparency: it voted last week to ratify the decisions it made in improperly noticed budget work sessions, curing, from a legal perspective, the invalidity of those actions. That step delayed budget review even further, as the April 1 deadline rapidly approaches.