Voters pass school budget at Newfound deliberative session

BRISTOL — The impact of losing three out of seven towns in the Newfound Area School District has led to concerns about the allocation of funds and resources, with some residents at the Feb. 1 deliberative session also questioning the calculation of the default budget, administrative costs, and the effectiveness of educational programs.

In the end, the proposed budget of $26.48 million went forward without amendment on a ballot vote of 78-20.

Voters also sent along the other warrant articles, only correcting the wording of a petitioned article on revoking the district’s 2% tax cap to conform to the wording in the state statute governing such action.

As voters considered the amendment, moderator Ned Gordon asked district attorney Barbara Loughman for an opinion on whether the petition as originally worded would hold up.

“People love these lawyer responses,” she said. “The statute says what the wording of the question shall be, and the language in the proposed amendment is the language in the statute. Normally, in New Hampshire, when a statute says ‘shall’, that means whatever you’re doing is mandatory. You have to do it. However, I am not entirely convinced that a court, if asked, would have said that the decision of the district meeting if the vote is in favor of rescinding the tax cap, I don’t know if a court would say, ‘Well, you didn’t have exactly the right wording, and therefore I’m going to throw it out there.’ Courts are reluctant to do that.

"I think the conservative course is to make sure that the wording of the warrant article complies with the statute, so that there is no issue later on that even gets to go to court if the voters vote in favor of it.”

Gordon summed up, “The answer is, ‘maybe.'” The amendment passed.

The ballot voters will see at their individual town elections on Tuesday, March 11, will have two questions about the tax cap: One would revoke it, while the other would increase the cap from 2% to 5%. During discussion, some voters spoke of how important it is to keep the current cap, some supported the modest increase, and others dismissed any tax cap as being unnecessary.

The cap is fashioned after the one adopted by the city of Franklin after a bond for building a middle school led to a 16% increase in property taxes in a single year. Franklin’s cap originally applied to spending, but soon was amended to take into account changes in revenue as well. Its purpose is to control the increase in the amount taxpayers have to pay from one year to the next.

Tax cap limitations affect how budgets are formed. Without a cap, communities can build a budget based on actual needs and costs, which can go up or down each year and potentially lead to high increases. With a cap, budget-writers first calculate the maximum they are allowed to spend, and then build a budget to spend as much as they can, realizing that if they ever propose less spending, they will be unable to make up the difference in future years.

The cap does not prevent the legislative body — taxpayers — from voting to exceed the amount allowed under the cap if they deem the expenditure necessary.

Shevaun Cazeault, Alexandria’s budget committee representative, said, “The tax cap, in my opinion, is an inefficient use of taxpayer time, because it simplifies complex fiscal challenges and solutions without addressing the nuanced needs of the school district. Instead of encouraging thoughtful, strategic budgeting, it forces decision-makers to work within arbitrary limits, potentially sacrificing important investments in education infrastructure.”

Jason North of New Hampton said, “Whether you’re for or against the tax cap, I think this is an important petition to have on there. Because we’ve now lost three towns that have voted on the original tax cap, so it allows those towns that are remaining to make their choice clear and concise, and not have towns that are no longer affected by this be part of it.”

Linda Phillips of Bristol argued for keeping the cap, saying, “The only protection we have is to have a tax cap, and it’s about providing greater flexibility to taxpayers. There’s no flexibility if you remove a tax cap ... the spending can go up through the roof.”

Don Milbrand of Bristol also supported the tax cap. “I've lived in this area 21 years, and the tax cap is absolutely necessary,” he said, adding when there is a real need to spend more, “I’ve never seen this body at voting day turn down the requested increases that they need. The tax cap at least gives them a place to start.

"If you just take the tax cap off, the townspeople here have no say any longer. We need to keep the tax cap in and keep it at 2%.”

Rick Alpers, Newfound budget committee member from Bristol, said, “I’ve never understood the need for a tax cap, because the tax cap is the people. You have to show up to the meeting. You have to vote. The people will let you know very quickly whether they support something, or they’ll vote it down very quickly as well.

"The 2% tax cap is extremely restrictive. You know, this is the first time in years — and there are reasons for that — that we’re not standing up here trying to make an amendment to add $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 into the budget so we don’t have to cut staff or sports. That’s probably going to happen in future years. So this gives us some flexibility ... to have thoughtful, hard conversations as a district, as a community, about where we want our education to go; but when you have that tax cap, it’s immediately restrictive.”

Ariel Maloney of Bristol commented, “I understand the struggle that families go through. What I would encourage every person in this room and watching from home live, or if you watch the video afterward, to put some pressure on our state representatives. New Hampshire has some of the lowest state funding for educational spending in the nation.”

Quoting from fairfunding.org, she said, “‘While New Hampshire’s public schools spend about $20,000 per pupil on average under its current funding formula, the state provides only about $4,800 per pupil in state adequacy aid.’ And what this means is that local taxes, our property taxes, cover approximate more than 70% of education spending. And so that puts pressure on communities like ours, which I grew up in ... to come up with the funding for our public education. And if we can put pressure on our state representatives, who can solve this issue for our state as a whole, then we, in the future, in this room, will have a lot less stress, I think, about needing to come up with our local property taxes to kind of fill the balance of these expenditures that we do, or in many cases, do not, have any control over.”

A smaller district

With Bridgewater, Groton and Hebron opening Pasquaney School District on July 1, responsibility for all but the Hebron-Bridgewater Village School will fall to the four remaining towns. The change coincides with the end of the existing teachers’ contact, and the Newfound Area School Board negotiated a one-year contract for the coming year when the district faces unpredictable challenges.

Francine Wendelboe of New Hampton, who served as chair of the school board’s negotiating committee, explained the request for $391,459.22 in cost items associated with the contract.

“The union wanted to work with us,” she said. “They understood the position that we were in with the data and the fund balances and so on. So I think this was a fair negotiation, and I personally support it, and urge the voters to do so as well.”

She was referring to the November 2023 cyber attack which resulted in the loss of financial data, making it difficult to determine actual expenditures that could have guided discussions on what the district can afford going forward.

Business Administrator Angela Carpenter said, with reduced staffing for a smaller district, the negotiated agreement will cover 111 teachers. The amount on the warrant represents increases in salaries, benefits and taxes.

Another article seeks to restructure the school board — and by extension, the budget committee — to maintain an uneven number to help avoid tie votes. The current seven-member board has one member from each town, elected at-large. With three towns leaving, there would be a four-person board, so Article 6 calls for adding an at-large member who could come from any of the four towns to create a five-member board.

The article provides for the board to appoint that new member for the first year, with the position appearing on the ballot in 2026 to serve the remaining two years of what would be a three-year term.

Marie Carson of Alexandria proposed an amendment to postpone the new position until the 2026 election, which would avoid needing an appointment. She justified the delay, saying tie votes could be beneficial during the 2025-26 academic year when there are so many uncertainties.

“If you do have a tie, then that would be an opportunity to look at the situation and see why isn’t there an agreement to it? Is it lacking in details, people don’t understand? Is it lacking budgetary information? Is it going to be an impact to others, such as teachers or students, that we haven’t considered? It will open up the table for discussion more often than not,” Carson said.

Loughman said Carson’s proposed amendment “makes a lot of sense from a common-sense point of view,” but that, under RSA 671:4, there must be an uneven number of board members. She also said postponing the position until 2026 would throw off the required staggering of terms, intended to ensure no more than two members would be up for election in any single year.

With that explanation, even Carson did not vote in favor of her own amendment.

Voters also spent time discussing the proposed tuition agreement with Pasquaney to allow seventh through 12 graders to continue attending Newfound schools after the breakup. They questioned the tuition rates — which are the same as what the Hill School District pays to send students to Newfound — along with objections to the three-year term of the agreement.

Much of the questioning concerned the mechanics of how the rates would be adjusted to reflect actual costs to the district associated with those students’ presence. The agreement sets a basic tuition rate with adjustments for special services and participation in athletics and other extra-curricular activities.