HANSON – Members of the Hanson and Whitman select boards unanimously voted, in a joint meeting on Tuesday, April 4, against either endorsing or supporting the fiscal 2024 WHRSD budget as presented to the two towns. Each board voted separately on the motion.
They have requested their respective town administrators to send letters to the district about the vote, and stressed it was not intended to signal a lack of support for education.
“The thing that I really love about you guys being here is that this opens up a dialog between the two boards which is very much needed, in fact, it’s a dialog between the two towns, which is very much needed and, in fact a dialog between all parties is very much needed,” Hanson Select Board Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett said in opening the session she termed historic. “We’re here to talk about the elephant in the room, which is the school assessment.”
Members of both boards stressed their concerns and votes were not an indication of any lack of support for education, but of fiscal sustainability for their communities. The boards met in a joint session at Hanson Town Hall to discuss the financial implications of the school spending plam on municipal budgets, the urgent need for sustainable school budgets and their disappointment that there was a need for the towns to unite on budget issues in an effort to prevent cuts in other departments
“We’re really struggling right now,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said of her town’s budget, which she said could afford a 3.75-percent assessment increase, but still has more than $600,000 worth of cuts to make somewhere – after one round of budget trimming had already been done.
“When I say cuts, I want to be crystal clear that we have not targeted a department or people or positions, or anything. We may have to look at capital improvements and the like.”
She said cuts do not always translate to people’s jobs being cut.
Whitman Select Board Chair Randy LaMattina said that community is at a point where it can shoulder a 5-percent assessment increase right now, but “not a single penny more.”
“Anything more than that, we will have to start cutting,” he said. “If this [school] budget, as presented, were to go through, we would be facing crippling cuts within our town departments.”
While LaMattina declined to speculate on cuts, he cautioned they will be real, they would include jobs and would be “disastrous” for the town.
“I don’t think it’s the same as previous budget years,” he said. “We’re basically less than two weeks away from having to post our budget and I don’t think we’ve ever come down, since I’ve been involved in town politics, to a situation like this where it doesn’t seem we’ve really been listened to.”
He said that while Whitman has been pretty clear for a while about what the town could afford, “it seems to have gone over people’s heads” and he hopes the boards’ unified position will be clear.
“Their ask is what we’re really here to talk about,” LaMattina said.
FitzGerald-Kemmett agreed that the budget the towns are being asked to agree to would eviscerate Hanson’s budget.
“I don’t even want to speculate about what it would look like,” she said, making it clear that the Hanson Select Board is one that supports education, and she expressed confidence that Whitman officials feel the same way.
“You are looking at the daughter of a career high school history teacher,” she said. “I am not an anti-education person by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve spent years of my life raising money for the schools in a variety of capacities.”
When budget asks are reasonable – or even slightly beyond – she said she could probably support it.
A couple of years ago an override effort carried the threat that, without it police and fire layoffs would be needed, FitzGerald-Kemmett said, adding she is certain the residents do not ever want to see the town go through that again.
“There’s no way that this board can include the budget presented to us in our warrant,” she said. “We just can’t.”
Hanson Select Board members Joe Weeks, Ed Heal, Ann Rein and Jim Hickey were especially vocal in agreeing with FitzGerald-Kemmett that, while education is important, there are members of the Hanson community that simply cannot afford what is being asked.
“My grandparents live in town, and other people’s grandparents also live in town and we don’t want to tax people out of the town,” Weeks said, noting that, as Hickey has pointed out before, that a third of Hanson residents are of retirement age and on fixed incomes.
“We have to be mindful that we are advocating for the entirety of our constituency – not just a portion of it,” Weeks said, adding that the schools are doing their job advocating for education. “I may agree with that, but in tough times like this, it becomes incredibly more difficult, for us as leaders, to make incredibly hard decisions and lead and try to come to a decision that makes sense for everybody,”
“I’m against mismanagement,” Hickey said, emphasizing that he is not against education. “There are positions that are not needed. … The district got money from COVID, as the towns did, what did [the schools] do with that money if we were giving so much more of the one-time money?”
LaMattina said the boards, as policy makers in their respective towns, cannot support the school budget, but also stressed it’s not an education issue.
He also said the boards have to look at what got them to this point with the school budget, arguing it’s the district’s use of COVID funds such as the one-time ESSER grants for recurring cost positions, that concern him most.
“I actually used the word ‘reckless’ last year,” he said.
Using the funds to institute all-day K, while a predictable and needed risk, was still a risk and Whitman is having to use some one-time funds of its own this year to afford the 5 percent.
“We’re not seeing any growth in any other department,” he said, noting that both towns have been very vocal in where they’ve made cuts and what they can afford.
He said he was also disheartened to learn that the budget has not been included in the Wednesday, April 5 School Committee agenda.
Whitman Vice Chair Dan Salvucci said even a 5-percent increase would hurt other departments and that, like Hanson, Whitman has already made cuts.
“We’re running real thin to get to 5 percent,” he said.
Ambulance service challenges as well as staffing issues have cropped up in both towns due to the need to transport patients to hospitals at greater distances since the Brockton Hospital fire late last year.
Whitman’s Shawn Kain also pointed to sustainability as a key concern.
“We’ve gone to great lengths to understand how to create a financial plan that’s going to keep us in a sustainable situation,” Kain said, noting that Whitman has been lean on public safety over the last few years, but that the hold-harmless situation with the schools is eating most of the revenue.
“I think the 5 percent represents a number that allows us to fund the schools at a level that is sustainable, but also gives us some revenue to work with in other departments,” he said, but added a argument could be made that even that is not enough. “It’s not an easy dilemma.”
Whitman Select Board member Justin Evans also pointed out that, even at 5 percent the town is projecting about $270,000 in free cash.
“Because the schools are building the one-time money they used last year into their budget, into the assessment this year, we are using one-time money to keep up with it,” he said.