Bill Dawson: State of the state address did not give good news for Northfield

To The Daily Sun,

I had a bit of trouble with the governor’s state of the state address. He made a big deal of what he had done to make it easier for the towns to balance their budgets. What he left out was how the school aid formulas were skewed away from where they were in the past few years. His state tax cut didn’t translate to “good news” for the town of Northfield. We have few businesses in our town and more than the average number of children in the schools that we share with the towns of Tilton and Sanbornton.

In previous years, Northfield was able to make up for its lack of taxable businesses with a per-pupil state aid formula. This year, while the schools were receiving large amounts from the federal programs designed to offset the effects of COVID, the governor and the legislature saw an opportunity to tinker with the formula for school aid. We have been through this knot-hole before. We, or at least some of us, remember the Claremont Decision and the funding history that followed. Lest he forget, that was the reason for that tax he just cut.

Well, if he has managed to run up those big surpluses, maybe it was at the expense of poor districts scattered about “his state.” We are not going away and yes, we are having town meetings next month. You may already have guessed what the main topic will be. It certainly will not be shouts of joy about how the governor and the legislature gave us great help with school funding.

Now, just a bit about the surplus. The funds are in both the general fund and the education trust fund. It is a whopping $323.7 million total for fiscal year 2021. Of the total, the education trust fund totals $167 million. So, one could ask, where did all that large chunk of money, surplus money, go? Mystery solved, it took a short trip to the rainy day fund. It fell victim to the Revenue Stabilization Reserve Fund a.k.a. The Rainy Day Fund. There is a nice pot of gold there. Let’s hope it isn’t so big that it might get misappropriated by those who guard it. For those interested in charts and graphs, go to a site called NH Comprehensive Annual Balance chart showing the annual rainy day amounts from 1992 to the present year.

There is a rumor of the formation of a dedicated fund to support aid to municipalities starting in 2022 and using the Meals and Rentals Tax. Details about the aid were not well defined. Also not well defined, was the plan for spending the remaining ARPA fund balance of $579.70 by the end of 2026. The deadline for allocating the funds is Dec. 31, 2024. The stated reason for the ARPA funds was to assist low and moderate-income families. It was definitely not designed to allow “rainy day funds” to bloat beyond necessity.

Bill Dawson

Northfield