Last year I promised myself I wouldn't only post around election time, and yet here we are. I'm not even a district parent anymore, as my boy graduated in June. I'm still the middle school MATHCOUNTS co-coach with Ms. Gehling, and I was the NH state MATHCOUNTS coach this year. On Saturday Oyster River made it into the state MATHCOUNTS finals, which are slated for March 9.
I'm probably like a lot of people and haven't been paying too much attention to the school district lately. Let's take this opportunity to catch up together. There's of course been plenty of news in the intervening year, including a new superintendent who'll start in July. It's after midnight on Monday morning so let's just focus on the immediate future, Tuesday's Deliberative Session. I'll make it easy on myself and just watch and comment on the Budget Hearing video, pasting in screenshots as we go. I'll skip the self-congratulatory introduction, which will just get me angry.
Tax Impact
Most people reading are probably more concerned about their taxes going up than the details of the Deliberative Session and the warrant, so let's start there. We're given two tables:
We calculate the estimated school tax increase in Durham as .40/13.35=3.0%, in Lee as .82/15.32=5.4% and in Madbury as .97/19.20=5.1%.
If you're wondering why your tax bill hurts more in December than July, it's because there's not enough time from the election in March to calculate taxes to be collected in July, so July's bill is always half of the previous year's taxes. Then the December tax bills are calculated to make up the total appropriated by the voters in March, so all the increase lands there.
Deliberative Session Tuesday February 6, 2024, 7pm, Oyster River Middle School
The ORCSD Deliberative Session is Tuesday February 6th, 7pm, at the new ORMS recital hall (1 Coe Dr, Durham) for the second time. It will be Superintendent Morse's last DS as superintendent.
What's a Deliberative Session?
As I always say, the Deliberative Session is a real election where the citizenry gets to amend the budget. It's the vestige of the traditional NH town meeting. Unlike most NH elections, same day registration is usually not available at DS. So you need to be already registered to vote in one of the three towns to be given a voting card at DS. There is no provision for remote voting -- to vote at DS you must attend.
Attendance at DS varies between around 25 voters in bad weather to around 200 voters when there's a controversial issue. It's worth showing up just to keep a small group of renegades from cutting the budget in half, like what happened in Croydon. That's not likely to happen here because the voters can always choose the default budget on election day.
The purpose of the Deliberative Session is to give the voters an opportunity to amend the warrant articles before they're voted on. Some articles, such as negotiated contracts, cannot be amended. Some, like the main budget, can. A majority of voters at DS can change those numbers, overriding the judgement of the board. Then on election day (March 12, 2024), the voters get to vote each possibly amended warrant article up or down.
Each warrant article (except the ones that elect people) is read at DS, then explained by a board member. Voters can then line up at the podium, and when it's your turn you can ask questions that the panel, which includes the board, the superintendent, business administrator, district lawyer, maybe others, will attempt to answer. You're free to make a speech, but if your speech doesn't propose an amendment or comment on an already proposed amendment, you might want to think twice about making it. The safest amendments, in the sense you may be sure they are allowed and will survive a court challenge, are changes to the budget numbers.
Note from by John Parsons, used with permission; thanks John: I'd like to add an observation to this statement you included: "You're free to make a speech, but if your speech doesn't propose an amendment or comment on an already proposed amendment, you might want to think twice about making it." I second that, but I'll be more blunt about it. The moderators at district meeting have generally been patient over the years with speakers veering, usually on purpose, off-topic to make points unrelated to the article/amendment at hand. Technically speaking, all comments are supposed to directly address the specific topic under discussion. Please, everyone, stay on topic. Leave your rants to the 'any other business' portion of the meeting near the end.
The Warrant
The Warrant is the name for the ballot, and Warrant Article is the name for a ballot question. The warrant articles are the subject of the Deliberative Session, so let's go through them.
 |
YES or NO is a concern for election day in March; at the DS any voter may propose an amendment to change the top line number. They're free to give a speech about what to cut if the amendment is approved, but the board has wide discretion and doesn't have to listen to anything but the number. If the number is lowered below the default budget (which cannot be changed), the usual YES voters could organize a vote NO campaign and then at least get the default budget.
Here we see the board adopted a goal near the high end of its usual increases, which is perhaps expected as they attempt to keep up with the recent inflation. As for expenses, we got a nasty health insurance increase. The 15.1% is a `guaranteed maximum' for budgeting; often the actual number comes in less and the district gets to use the difference as a slush fund. The next five aren't a surprise; these are contracts negotiated in previous years. That includes the middle school bond; the $583K is the first payment of a second bond.
The Utilities number represents actual inflation. The mental health counselor was hired to cover the increasing demand in our post-COVID world. Music teacher Andrea von Oeyen has built Oyster River's strings program into a reported 260 students, which I think means an incredible 12% of Oyster River students are currently getting string instrument lessons through the school. The budget includes an additional strings teacher to share the load.
The two new positions account for $237K of the $319K difference between the default budget and the proposed budget; I don't know about the rest.
 |
It's getting late so I better move this along. If you haven't seen ORITA before, it's because the Oyster River Intervention and Tutors Association is a new union. I believe they're paraprofessionals, so I'm not sure why they're not part of ORPaSS. We have the usual exasperating lack of context: no indication of how many tutors we're talking about, no report of the associated expenses for total wages, benefits, FICA, etc. We're told the large number this upcoming year is due to the addition of health care for these folks. There's no amending negotiated contracts, but maybe we can get some answers at DS.
 |
This is the middle school solar array fund. The school has the option to buy the solar array after seven years. This article first appeared in 2021 so this will be the fourth year. It's a good move financially to buy the array, so to that end we put away $125K every year.
The fund balance is the unspent money at the end of the year. The boilerplate `No amounts to be raised from taxation' is misleading. What really happened is this money was already raised from taxation in March, 2023 so doesn't need to be added to the March, 2024 total. Unspent funds that are not diverted by a warrant article like this offset the following year's taxes, so however it's phrased, passing this article extracts an additional $125K from the citizenry.
 |
This fund is new. The district now owns two turf fields, with the older high school field (built in summer 2016 at a cost of $2.3M) needing major maintenance. The $125K is not a one-time expense; this is expected to be a recurring article that annually puts away what is presumably the estimated annual cost to maintain two turf fields. The life of a field is 10 to 13 years, so I don't think the math works out here; in 13 years we'll have collected $1.625M, not enough for one field, let alone two. Then again, I can imagine the installation costing more the first time than subsequent times.
It was Dr. Bob Barth who back in 2015 successfully worked to get the board to pay an additional $260K for safer, more expensive fill rather than tire crumb for the turf field, citing cancer concerns. Bob sadly passed away in November, 2023. Rest in peace, Bob, you were a model to us all. Bob is survived by his wife, former school board chair Maria Barth, and his children and grandchildren.
Even though it's funded from the fund balance, surprisingly the article is missing the boilerplate about `no amounts...' (at least on this slide). The amount may be amended at DS.
This is yet another fund dedicated to maintaining the fields. This fund is used to park the rent collected from renting out the athletic fields. It's a nice idea, almost certain to pass.
There's not much here to amend at DS; you could change the dollar to a penny, I suppose. My view of these funds is that they almost always contain money that would otherwise be in the pockets of taxpayers. That's true here; without this fund the receipts go into the operating account, where they add to the fund balance and offset next year's taxes. Now that I'm a grumpy old man and no longer a district parent, I'm inclined to believe that the money is better off with taxpayers. But I can see how it makes sense for the district to try to fill some coffers by stashing away unspent money, in order to ease the pain of the shocks that will inevitably occur.
Revenue
This is an ominous warrant, because in addition to a large increase in the operating budget, we see a trend of new warrant articles that aren't one-time expenses, but are intended to be annual appropriations. We see how the warrant asks for money to be added to various funds this year. The warrant doesn't explicitly indicate that the opposite is happening as well: taxes are being lowered by withdrawals from other funds. That gets us to the subject of revenue.
The warrant is about expenses, but of course the taxpayers are on the hook for expenses minus revenue. In the world of municipal accounting, withdrawing savings to pay for expenses counts as revenue, which is a bit of magical thinking. There are some actual revenue increases on this list: the increase in tuition income and in interest income. School Nutrition revenue is a wash with additional School Nutrition expenses. The rest are withdrawals from funds (and retained fund balance, otherwise unspent money this year). These withdrawals achieve a one-time reduction of a recurring cost, so have the effect of shifting some of the tax increase to the following budget year.
It's 3:40 am so this will have to be it. See you all tomorrow (Tuesday) at the Deliberative Session.
