Ensuring Legality
Newfound Awaits DRA Ruling On Budget Committee Error
BRISTOL — A technical error in the budget presentation at the Newfound Area School District’s deliberative session may require a special school district meeting to correct the problem.
When the Newfound Area School District Budget Committee voted against recommending the school board’s $27 million budget that removed funding for co-curricular activities, field trips, and other programs, it did not propose a budget of its own. State law requires that the budget going before the voters is one endorsed by the budget committee. In Newfound’s case, that budget also has to meet the provisions of the district’s 2 percent cap on the increase in the assessment to member towns.
The budget committee unanimously rejected the “tax cap budget” in order to offer an amendment restoring much of the funding during the annual meeting.
The school district is awaiting a ruling from the NH Department of Revenue Administration on the matter.
A similar problem occurred once before, according to School Board Chair Melissa Suckling, who reviewed the record of the January 19, 2021, deliberative session. That year, neither the school board nor the budget committee recommended the tax cap budget that went before the voters.
“The DRA said, no, you can’t do that,” Suckling told the school board on February 9. “So then we had an emergency meeting — and it’s very hard to hear, because it’s a tape recording meeting — but what I can gather from that meeting is, what we had to do is change on the MS 27 [budget report]. I believe we changed our budget recommendation on the MS 27 to a budget that … we thought would be more appropriate, … and then the budget committee had to put in the budget.”