School Board describes taxpayers as 'giant hindrance'

To The Daily Sun,

Last week an article was printed in area newspapers that described the Newfound Area School District’s policy on formulating its budget. The article stated that “allowing taxpayers to vote on separate capital improvement articles would be a giant hindrance.” The article stated that the replacement of the roof on Newfound High School was part of a maintenance expenditure and as such the cost could be carried into the next year’s default budget. That would enable the School Board to extort just shy of $1 million dollars from those “giant hindrance” taxpayers on a yearly basis. The article also claims that the school board is exploiting a provision of the Official Ballot Act (RSA 40:13) that allows the board to determine what constitutes a one-time expenditure. There is no such authority granted in RSA 40:13.

Reading comprehension doesn’t seem to be the School Board’s strong point; it seems that those “Giant Hindrance” taxpayers went ahead and passed a warrant article at the last election adopting RSA 40:14-b. This RSA gives total responsibility for formulating the “Default” budget to the School Budget Committee not the school board. Let us “Giant Hindrance” taxpayers hope the Budget Committee will deliver an honest budget to the school district taxpayers.

Paul Simard

Bristol