As I have said before, it turns out that “No doesn’t mean NO!” when it comes to SB2 Budget Committee deliberations because of a “technical flaw” in RSA 32 (and to a smaller degree, RSA 40). While BudComms must deal at General Ledger line levels (we are prohibited from just “lopping off” or “adding to” the net bottom lines of municipal or school district budgets, after our presented budget(s) are accepted, modified, or denied by the Legislative Body (er, the voters in a given town), the Governing Bodies (Selectmen, School Boards) then submitted the finalized budgets to the NH Department of Revenue Administration (“DRA”) using forms known as “MS-Form”). Essentially, they are “roll up” forms – instead of listing all of the individual line items, they simply show aggregated totals of the department budgets (e.g., the entire Police budget in a single line).
Once done, and the “Purpose” (very important word, that) has been set, the Governing Bodies are then able to transfer monies from one lower level GL account line item to another – including into those line items that BudComms may have zeroed out. So, I’m looking to crowdsource for a bit of help.