It has been nearly two weeks since “Town Elections” in New Hampshire, that Tuesday in March when a majority of local elections occur in the Granite State. One in particular that we mentioned was the Timberline Regional School District (TRSD), famous on our pages for its former Superintendent Earl Metzler and contributor Donna Green, who kept taking him and TRSD to court to get public documents.
Earl is bothering someone else these days, and Donna got a Nackey Loeb School First Amendment Award for her trouble. But TRSD didn’t stop being a problem child after Metzler’s departure. And like every district, it forever demands bigger budgets to fund declining outcomes. Taxpayers in the four towns that make up TRSD took it upon themselves to try to end the abuse.
From our previous reporting:
Article 2 on the District Ballot approved a school budget lower than asked for, which passed on Tuesday, 3211 to 3049. They also passed a 2.5% tax cap on future school budgets, and an effort to retain excess funds from the previous budget failed. Timberlane will have to return that sum to taxpayers (not sure how that works, but it sounds good to me).
[correction: the tax cap article was to create a committee to look at a cap]
The schoolies wanted a recount, which is a fair request, especially since one of those “losing” votes was a tie. The recount was this week, and ‘Grok friend Linda Brown called me with the good news.
Article #2 decreased the school budget from 89,798,656 to 81,941,925, saving taxpayers almost eight million dollars.
Article #7 (which was the tie) resulted in a six-vote difference after the recount. This warrant was to prevent TRSD to keep millions in excess funds not expended from the previous budget. Voters chose to get their money back.
The tax cap was not an object of the recount, so they kept that win from March 11th.
You could make an argument that taxpayers are still losers, but that’s always true when it comes to dealing with local spending and school budgets. Public School spending is why property taxes are so high. It is why other municipal and public safety budgets suffer until you can tie school spending to results or introduce real competition by ending the government monopoly, that will not change.
But there was a change. Enough voters were activated in a traditionally low turnout election to try and slow the bleeding. That’s something to celebrate.
