Newfound voters support teacher contract, oust 1 incumbent

BRISTOL — Voters in the Newfound Area School District on Tuesday agreed to fund a new collective bargaining agreement covering the teachers' union and made it clear they wanted to keep in place a cap on property taxes. The winning margins in both cases registered at the 66 percent level.

Newfound voting is conducted under the official ballot (SB-2) system.

In elections conducted for school board members, Jeff Levesque ousted incumbent Jim Hajek for the Groton seat by a vote of 920 to 374. Incumbents Sue Cheny (Alexandria) and Vincent Migliore (Bridgewater) were re-elected without opposition.

Harold Reilly (Alexandria) and Jeff Bird (Bridgewater) were elected to the budget committee without opposition.

The new teachers' contract is a one-year agreement the school board promoted as granting employees a modest raise in return for concessions in the area of health insurance. The additional cost for the 2013-2014 school year was estimated at $56,793.

Enacted last March, the tax cap limits the increase in property taxes collected in support of schools in the seven-town district to 2 percent per year.

Voters overwhelmingly approved the proposed $21.7.million operating budget for the next school. The vote was 1,431 to 459.

By a 1,293 to 691 margin, voters also agreed to allow the school board to retain up to 2.5 percent of the amount collected in property taxes in an undesignated fund balance derived from monies appropriated but not spent. Until a recent change, New Hampshire law did not allow school district's to retain unspent, undesignated funds from year to year, though townships have always been able to do so.