Taxpaying public soundly defeats the adding of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the budget
Karen Cota, a former school board member from Roxbury tried to amend the proposed budget so that it was higher than the default budget by a few hundred thousand dollars.
Colleen Dreyfuss, former Chair of the MRSD, backed Cota’s efforts publicly. By secret ballot, the taxpayers present rejected that amendment by a vote of 115 to 94. The initial budget of $31,694,597 was then approved by the voters. The Monadnock School Tapayers Association supported this budget, which is almost $700,000 LESS than the default budget.
Article #3 which created an Employee Health Insurance Trust fund was also passed by the voters. Thus, surplus tax money from health care costs will go into this fund and be used towards the next year’s health care costs. Many times in the past, surplus health care funds were treated almost like a “slush fund” and spent on anything the school board wanted, which would also raise the default budget. Last year’s health care cost surplus was $717,000. The Monadnock Schools Taxpayers Association initiated this warrant article and the school board carried it forward. This is a win for the beleaguered tax paying families of the school district.
Towards the end of the meeting, after most of the non-union voters had left, the teacher union amended article #9 which effectively deleted it from the ballot. This article was to see if the voters of the MRSD would direct the school board to support any and all efforts of the NH School Board Association to seek legislative appeal of RSA 273-A:12, Section VII, the provision in the statute commonly referred to as the statutory “Evergreen Clause”. This would restore local control in the collective bargaining and school district budget process. The Monadnock School Board and the Budget committee supported this article. The teacher union squashed it by removing it from the ballot, thus depriving the voting public of the right to vote on the initiative at all.
Union members and their supporters who remained, then used the forum to speak about article #9 to lambaste Mr. Bauries, the president of the Monadnock Taxpayers Association. When Mr. Bauries got up to speak to the article, the union members, in unison, all walked out of the gym. Bauries made the point that even under the proposed budget, the cost per student in MRSD is $16,733- the highest in the area.
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Note: According to official numbers, attendance at Saturday’s meeting was 220, or about 2.2 percent of the district’s 10,196 voters from Fitzwilliam, Gilsum, Richmond, Roxbury, Sullivan, Swanzey and Troy.
Can you imagine the power of the vote to control spending found here, if just 1,000 of you were to get out to your town meetings and deliberative sesions?