Now we're back to a majority vote for the regional school budget rather than a unanimous vote (which I understand to be needed if you're employing the DOE "alternative" assessment -- see the previous posting). True, the DOE regs changed this past January, after the alternative assessment method was developed, but someone should be tracking these things.
Who organizes Town Meeting? One hopes that each of the articles would have been reviewed by both counsel and the moderator and agreement reached on the wording and the action required.
As it stands, the meetings of the World's Second Greatest Deliberative Body have a funky quality to them. Warrant articles aren't necessarily in the sequence TM proceeds in, meetings start late, attendance varies and more. Information tends to be distributed asymmetrically and the meeting is no exception.
Open town meeting anyone? Counsel/manager government?
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The legal issues are beyond me, but a number of regional districts have been embroiled in disputes for several years, including at least three new districts since the regs were updated in January.
As far as equity, the DOE's current notion of equity is "target local share".
Equitable required minimum contributions should be exactly the target local share, but DOE is slowly phasing in from legacy data that has more to do with how much a town spent in 1993, increased by Prop 2.5 limits, than anything else; and this legacy data often seems arbitrary.
The upshot for the Amherst-Pelham regional is that Amherst and Pelham should have very similar "required contributions" (Pelham, according to current figures, is slightly LESS able to pay than Amherst) according to target local share, but have very different statutory required contributions this year.
Some of the differences in regional assessments under the statutory formula are reasonable, but my statewide review shows about 40 towns paying at least 25% above their target local share. Pelham is 35% over, Shutesbury 27% above theirs.
The combined difference between should and is, is the whopping 48% or whatever the exact number is difference between the assessment methods.
I think the alternate agreement is a reasonable one for this regional school, and currently, the statutory formula is unreasonable. When target shares are closer to correct, the statutory formula may be reasonable - but within the statistical accuracy of each town's "wealth" measurement, I suspect at least three of the towns, including Amherst, ought to have assessments quite similar to their current alternate assessment.
The basic problem right now is that three towns passed a budget with the 3% increase recommended by the school committee, which Amherst's powers that be anticipated would not be a problem, as they expected the override to pass. The whole negotiating process is problematic because of time constraints to probe alternate proposals and get them pushed through four town's approval processes. The DOE has created a mess of a process, and having the alternate methodologies with wildly diverent year to year figures makes it nearly impossibly complicated to properly resolve.
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