HANSON – The Healey-Driscoll administration is asking towns what they need from state government, and the Select Board plans to tell them just that by the Friday, Oct. 20 deadline.
Board members on Tuesday, Oct. 10 pointed to the need for more money – for schools, infrastructure, and elder services, as well as the need for equitable changes to the way regional school agreements are governed as key concerns for the town.
“I need them to give us more money for schools and infrastructure,” said Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett.
Town Administrator Lisa Green was drafting the email to the governor’s office for the board. Green had also attended a meeting between Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll and area municipal representatives at Bridgewater State University recently. Organized by the UMass Collins Center, it covered areas that impact municipalities such as laws and regulations as well as areas they want to see the administration work on to change, update or revise laws to make things easier for towns and cities to address residents’ needs.
“The administration and the governor are very interested in being partners with municipalities,” Green said. “They’re reaching out now … to get feedback on areas we would like them to focus on.”
While FitzGerald-Kemmett said she could not place enough emphasis on the schools, she agreed with board member Ann Rein that infrastructure is also key.
“The way school looks has changed dramatically in terms of the emotional support components and the number of special needs children and all of that, and it’s like a runaway train in terms of funding,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said.
“I think we need to look at both infrastructure and the schools, because there’s a lot of infrastructure that needs help” Rein said.
“I think that we need to have them, if they’re willing to listen to it, we have a whole bunch of people who are going to look at regional agreements and things like that,” Vice Chair Joe Weeks said. “If they’re going to listen to us, I want them to look at the way in which they structure regional agreements so that they benefit everybody – not just one town.”
He also said, that while they talk about kids a lot, Hanson has a lot of elderly on fixed incomes.
“Our elder services and elder affairs need a lot more money and a lot more attention,” he said. “I think we’ve got to look at both ends of the life spectrum.”
Green said health and human services was a concern the Bridgewater State meeting also touched on, as well as school transportation.
“I really think we’re going to be coming up against a perfect storm of public safety departments vs. the schools [at the annual Town Meeting in May] and there’s not going to be enough money to go around,” Weeks said. “I really don’t want to get into a ‘who is more important’ and ‘which budget line item is more important than the next.’ We constantly have our first responders sacrificing themselves and making dedications so the town can stay afloat.”
He urged outlining to the governor exactly the kind of budgeting challenges small towns like Hanson with little commercial property taxation are facing when they have to lean on residential property taxes.
“We’re always putting neighbors against each other and that’s not the town we want and that’s not what I would think the governor would want,” he said.
The October Town Meeting, starting with $2,267,948 from free cash and other enterprise and stabilization accounts, and concluded with $1,486,433.56 remaining.
While that figure is good, there is still uncertainty about the fiscal 2025 budget. FitzGerald-Kemmet said she would like to see the town accountant continue to search for past allotments that were voted, but never spent and/or grant reimbursements to bolster that number.
“I think we all know that there’s a cliff that we’re about to fall off if we don’t have an override,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “I don’t know what that override looks like – maybe there’ll be some rabbit pulled out of a hat – I don’t know.’
In other business, the board deferred the matter of supporting a borrowing issue for a proposed Whitman Middle School back to the School Committee as it is really not germane to Hanson.