Thrift Dominates Town Meetings

Jon, it sounds as though the residents of Marlborough might have bucked the mood that seemed to have colored most other town meetings.

In a lot of places the budget committees, school boards and selectmen had come up with what they thought were pretty stripped down budgets and the voters turned around and said, sorry, that’s not stripped down enough.

You can look at Allenstown where they rejected the town and school budgets. And they also said no to 1.5 million to expand the wastewater treatment plant. That project is turning into your classic hard luck story. Town leaders keep trying to renovate it and voters keep putting the kibash on those plans.

In Seabrook the voters turned back several union contracts. The fire fighters, police and town workers all had agreements that needed voter approval and they all failed.

You reported earlier on Seabrook’s library and its request for 30,000 dollars to buy new books. Did they also get shot down?

No, the library seemed to find the soft spot in the voters’ hearts. They got their money. Maybe because the same down economy that makes people hold tight on the purse strings also tends to boost visits to the library. Free books, free movies, a pretty good deal.
Belmont voters also approved money for their library.

How was turnout?

On the whole, very healthy. Deering had a record turnout. A number of other towns might not have set a record but they had good numbers. I think people knew that this was a difficult budget year. They were engaged. They were worried about their pocketbooks. Money, especially the fear of losing some of yours, tends to get people to the polls and participating in town meeting.

What was the general result for school budgets?

Tough, but mixed. School boards put together budgets that in general showed a healthy respect for the recession. What they put forward had a lot of cuts or level funding of departments. In some cases, like in Chester and Amherst, voters took that at face value and approved the school budget.
But then in places like Weare, the school budget went down by a wide margin.
In Hudson, they killed an article that would have started public kindergarten. They went further and told the town to stick to its guns in a law suit against the state education department. Hudson is arguing that the state has mandated kindergarten but isn’t paying for it, which would be an unfunded mandate.

What comes next?

People shouldn’t think that just because there was a lot of voting yesterday that the show is over. Lots of towns hold business meetings between now and Saturday where voters get to decide a lot of things like workforce housing, buying new fire trucks and other items large and small.
Plus, we shouldn’t forget that about 11 towns hold town meeting in April and May.
We’ve got a lot of that meeting information on our web site on the interactive town meeting map. Not every town took the 3 or 4 minutes to fill out an online form with those details but well over a hundred did. And it’s not too late. The town of Marlow just sent us its form about an hour ago.

Jon, thanks very much.

Jon Greenberg has been following town and school meeting for us. You can get highlights about your town at our web site, nhpr.org. If you went to town meeting, feel free to post a comment on what you saw.